"Freedom vs Freedom" by PQHAÜS

"Freedom vs Freedom" by PQHAÜS

(Acrylic on canvas / 16x20 inches / 2025)

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My therapist once asked me to write a list of reasons I was grateful to still be alive. I wrote things like I get to see my family, I can travel wherever I want. By the ninth line, she laminated the paper and handed it back to me.

“This,” she said, “is the freedom you still have because you are not dead. The power you carry. The privilege you have forgotten but never lost.”

She was right. But I was angry.

Not because her words all sounded too cliche like something you’d find on a coffee mug or hear in a graduation speech. But because my brain had no function for gratitude. The list was real, but I wasn’t. Every sentence on that page felt like it belonged to someone else. Someone who knew how to feel alive.

When the people I loved most chose to leave this world because they were too sad, too tired, I was left holding a storm with no name. I was devastated, but also furious. Furious at this thing called depression. It does not make a scene. It does not shatter glass or slam doors. It lingers. It lies next to you at night and rises before you do. It steals the air while you are still trying to breathe.

I spent years trying to picture it. To give it a body. A shape. Something I could blame. And one night, I saw it.

I was sitting in a cold, still room. The kind of stillness that presses against your skin like weight. And there, in the center, floated a chair. Plastic and leather. Cheap. Familiar. The kind you find in waiting rooms or church basements. The kind that knows how to hold people who have sat too long in silence.

It hovered, burning. The plastic melted, curling inward like dying petals. The leather split like dry skin. I sat across from it, just watching. I did not move. I did not try to save it. I only watched it fall apart in silence.

That chair was depression.

Not a monster hiding in the dark. Not a violent storm. Just a place you sit in without realizing. A place that accepts your weight and quietly teaches you to forget how to stand. And when it burns, it does not scream. It does not fight. It just waits. It glows. It invites.

They told me life was a choice between freedom and death. As if freedom only existed on one side. But no one warned me that, for some, death might feel like the only freedom left. And that broke something in me. Because I wanted to be angry at them for leaving. But I couldn’t be. Not fully. Not when I understood, deep in a place I never wanted to speak from, that maybe they were not choosing to die. Maybe they were choosing to escape.

So now I carry that image. The chair. The fire. The cold room. I do not glorify it. I do not forgive it. I carry it because it reminds me of what I am fighting. What they were fighting. Something that looks like rest. Feels like relief. But leaves only smoke. Only silence.