The Sorrow That Won’t Stop

By Michael Hood

I can’t write today. Truth is, I haven’t been able to write for three days. That’s about 72 hours of watching perfectly good ideas circle the drain like hair after a bad haircut.

Oh, sure—words dribble out of my head, roll down the spinal cord, and leak into my fingers like warm Jell-O. But not the words I’m looking for. Not the ones that matter. I’m a writer. It’s what I do. I take the chaos in my skull, run it through a grammar sieve, and call it storytelling. But right now, the only thing coming out of the sieve is pulp—half-thoughts and squishy metaphors that dissolve before I can pin them down.

I know why this is happening.

I’m mentally ill.

That’s not a confession—it’s more like a weather report. “Expect partly cloudy despair with a 90% chance of existential dread.” I have Major Depressive Disorder. MDD. The Big Bad Mood Wolf that huffs and puffs and blows down my house every few months.

It starts with a sorrow so deep you could lose a goddamn submarine in it. Then come the tears. Big, stupid, choking sobs that arrive uninvited like Jehovah’s Witnesses at a hungover brunch. And I hate crying. It’s not cathartic. It doesn’t wash anything clean. It just leaves me snotty, swollen, and vaguely ashamed.

Because let’s face it—men don’t cry.
We explode. We drink. We disappear.
We joke about it until the edge dulls.

Yesterday, I had a summit with my mental health pit crew: My psychiatrist of 27 years, my psychologist of 23, and my wife of 48. It’s like the world’s most depressing episode of This Is Your Life. They’ve seen me like this before—out of gas, stuck in neutral, lights on but nobody wants to come home.

I tried to explain why I was crying, why I couldn’t write, why the world felt like it was scraping against my skin. But the truth is, I didn’t know. There’s no villain here, no triggering event, no Freudian origin story. Sometimes the beast just wakes up and decides it’s my turn.

They nodded. They listened. They adjusted the meds like NASA engineers tweaking a spacecraft orbit. I left with a new pharmaceutical cocktail, a little hope, and the kind of exhaustion that feels bone-deep.

This is what depression looks like. Not sad music and poetry journals. Not storm clouds and rain. It's failing to write a sentence because your brain feels like it’s been shelled by Ukrainian drone fire. It’s sobbing in front of three people who love you and still feeling unworthy. It’s trying to explain something invisible to people who already understand—and still not finding the words.

I’m not writing this for sympathy. I'm writing it because it’s Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month, and we’re not supposed to talk about this stuff. We’re supposed to rub dirt in it, walk it off, laugh it off, drink it off.

But silence is a hell of a drug. And it kills more of us than we care to admit.

So here I am. Crying, writing, not writing, breathing.

Still here.

And for today, maybe that’s enough.