Some mornings the day asks nothing of you yet, and you are already too tired for it. The alarm sounds, or the room grows light, or someone down the hall starts moving through their own morning, and before a single task exists to be done, you are lying there calculating whether you have enough in you to sit up. Not to accomplish anything. Just to sit up.
No one warns you that depression can live in the body like this, as a wall between wanting to be somewhere else and being physically capable of getting there. It isn't laziness, and it isn't a lack of reasons to get moving. You may have every reason: people who need you, a job waiting, a life you would like to be living. The reasons were never the problem. The problem is that your body has stopped answering, and knowing every reason in the world does not seem to change that.
There is a particular shame that comes with this kind of stuck. Other struggles at least look like struggles. This one looks, from a doorway, like nothing: a person still in bed at an hour when everyone else is already dressed and moving. It is easy to start believing the silence around it means something is wrong with your character rather than something wrong with your capacity right now. Being unwilling and being unable can look identical from the outside. They are not the same thing.
You have probably already tried the obvious answers. Go to bed earlier. Get some fresh air. Push through the first five minutes and the rest will follow. Sometimes those things help a little, and sometimes they do nothing at all, and either way they miss what is actually happening. This is not a sleep problem or a willpower problem waiting on the right trick. It is depression, doing to your body exactly what it does: making the smallest required motion feel like the largest one you will attempt all day.
If you have ever read about what it is like to keep functioning while feeling completely hollow inside, you already know depression does not always look the same from one day to the next. Some days it hides behind a face that still shows up to work. Other days there is no face to hide behind, because there is no getting up to put one on. Both are real depression. This is simply the morning when the exhaustion has become visible, at least to you, in the shape of a body that will not move.
What you are carrying is rarely just this one morning. It is the sum of every morning like it, stacked underneath today before today has even started. That kind of depletion, the sense that there is nothing left in you before the day has made its first demand, is its own particular kind of running on empty. It is not a failure of effort. It is the truth of where you are right now, and it deserves to be named as truth rather than argued with.
You may also be carrying the added weight of what this does to the people around you, the sense that your love for them should be enough to get you moving even when your body cannot follow through on it. It is possible to love someone completely and still be unable to make your legs swing over the edge of the bed. Love was never the missing ingredient. Capacity was.
There is an old prayer that begins from exactly this kind of morning, one that does not wait for the person praying to gather themselves first. It starts already in the deep end, a voice calling up from somewhere it cannot climb out of on its own, asking only to be heard. It does not offer a plan for getting out of the depths. It does not pretend the depths are not real. It simply asks, plainly, to be listened to from inside them. That may be the whole prayer some mornings need to be.
If even that feels like too much today, if you cannot find your own words for any of this, you can request a prayer for depression and let someone else carry the words for a while. You do not have to explain how you got here or defend why this is hard. You only have to be willing to let the asking happen on your behalf, just this once, while you stay exactly where you are.
You are not being asked to want the day today. You are not being asked to feel differently than you feel, or to manufacture gratitude you do not have, or to believe this will lift by tomorrow simply because you would like it to. You are only being seen, right now, in the specific place where getting up has become the hardest thing you do, and told that this counts. It is not a small thing to be praying through. For today, it is the whole of it.
This particular weight tends to loosen in inches, not all at once, and there is no timeline you are failing to meet. If you want a place to keep bringing mornings like this one, whenever they come, the prayers for depression gathered here were built for exactly this kind of exhausted, honest moment, without asking you to perform anything you do not have.