Raining In My Heart

Raining In My Heart

3 part series        Part 1        Part 2            Part 3

“The sun is out, the sky is blue, there’s not a cloud to spoil the view, but it’s raining… Raining in my heart.”

Depression hits me like weather I never asked for. One minute the day looks normal, the next I’m drowning under a sky no one else can see. People around me think I’m doing “okay.” I’ve got a job, I’ve got a place to sleep, I’m alive, I’m rebuilding — the basics are there.

But inside? None of that feels true. It’s like my outside life is on one channel and the inside of my chest is tuned to static.

Take my job. I really believed that by now — after incarceration, after clawing my way out of the mess I created — I’d be doing something meaningful, something that at least felt like progress. Instead, I’m 40 years old standing behind a Wendy’s counter, punching buttons and handing over bags.

And yeah, I’m grateful to be working. I say that because I’m supposed to. But the truth is uglier. Every time I put that uniform on, something in me sinks. I feel small. I feel like I failed the test of adulthood that everyone around me seems to have passed without studying.

A customer told me Sunday that he liked my energy. A normal person would take that to heart. I just nodded, handed him his meal, and felt… nothing. Depression does that — it disconnects the wires. Compliments don’t land. Achievements don’t register. You’re alive, but numb.

And under that numbness is shame — the kind that gnaws at you quietly. I can’t even take care of myself the way I want to. I can’t provide. I can barely breathe some days. It feels like everyone else is moving forward while I’m stuck rewriting the same fucking answer sheet, hoping the grade magically changes.

My home doesn’t help. I’m thankful for it — I know what the alternative looks like — but it still whispers failure. Too small. Too temporary. Too much like a holding cell for someone who messed up their whole life. When I sit there alone long enough, the walls start throwing old mistakes back at me like echoes I can’t shut off.

And the worst part? The uncertainty. The not knowing where any of this is going. Buddy Holly says it better than I ever could:
“Oh misery, misery… What’s going to become of me?”

Sometimes I try to hide it, pretend I’m fine, slap a smile on my face and call it progress. But I know the truth.

“I tell my blues, they mustn’t show, but soon these tears are bound to flow ’cause it’s raining… Raining in my heart.”

That line hits too close. Because no matter how hard I try to get ahead of my depression, it grabs me again. Pulls me under. Makes the world feel smaller and darker and heavier.

Depression shrinks everything down to your failures. It erases the work you’ve done. It laughs in your face when you say you’re rebuilding. It whispers that nothing you do matters — and worse, that you don’t matter.

Some days I genuinely have no idea what success even looks like anymore. Is the only victory that I’m not behind bars? Is that really the bar now? Some days it feels like it is.

But maybe this is part of it — sitting in the middle of the heaviness, admitting that the storm isn’t always outside. Some storms you don’t walk through. Some storms you carry inside you, and you just try to keep moving anyway.

I take some comfort in what Jesus said to in Matthew 11:28.  "Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest"

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