Kate Gompert on the psych ward — "When people call it that I…"
‘When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.’ […] ‘Well this’—she gestured at herself—‘isn’t a state. This is a feeling. I feel it all over. In my arms and legs.’ […] ‘All over. My head, throat, butt. In my stomach. It’s all over everywhere. I don’t know what I could call it. It’s like I can’t get enough outside it to call it anything. It’s like horror more than sadness. It’s more like horror. It’s like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine—no, worse than you can imagine because there’s the feeling that there’s something you have to do right away to stop it but you don’t know what it is you have to do, and then it’s happening, too, the whole horrible time, it’s about to happen and also it’s happening, all at the same time.’
Context
The scene's core: Kate rejecting the word "depression" — the blue peaceful state people picture — and defining what she actually has: total-body horror, about-to-happen and happening at once. This is the first-person phenomenology of what the anhedonia essay will call It, and the single most load-bearing passage in the theme outside scene 135 itself.