I've been meaning to write this for a long time now, but I couldn't figure out how to organize it, or what to say, or how personal I should make it. I knew that I wanted to make this (and any subsequent) post public so that other people who are suffering from depression can stumble on it and read it.
I think I'll limit the content of this post to the experience of depression and leave recovery and the experience of having people you care about being depressed to other posts. Also, when I talk about depression here, I'm talking about major depressive disorder, not seasonal affective disorder or the downswings of bipolar, though it may also apply.
I used to read magazine articles on depression and wonder how people could tell the difference between being depressed and being moody, or sad, or angry, all normal reactions to external circumstance. As such, it's easy to go out and say that depression isn't really a mental illness, that it's just a slightly more extreme reaction to things. After all, everyone feels sad or down every so often.
Depression (for me at least) makes it so that the sad, down, grey, dreary feeling is the norm, that anything that brightens your day will quickly pass, that all you have to look forward to is drudgery, misery.
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coffeeandink writes that depression is the least linear of narratives; it's an endless loop of self-loathing and recrimination, of a constant lack of energy. Every step forward only leads to two steps back, everything good is temporary, everything bad is forever. It's not dramatic, except for the occasional bursts of temper or crying jags, the suicide attempts or suicidal ideation, the bouts of self-injury. Even these are relegated to monotony; from the inside, it's only an increase in the level of misery. It will go away, but only for greyness to take its place, only to lurk around and come back another day when you're more susceptible.
That sounds bad enough, but the problem is, that's only the foundation. I don't know which is the cause and which is the effect, but on top of this drab existence is self-loathing, disgust, anger at yourself, at your friends, at your family, at the world. There's the bone-deep conviction that something is wrong with you, and that it's not a mental illness, but a character flaw. There's the thoughts that while other people have real and serious problems, you're only being weak and selfish. Other people suffer from depression; you are just stupid and lazy and fat and ugly.
I hope this doesn't sound romantic. It's not. It's tiring and boring and repetitive. After a while, you get sick of yourself, you get sick of your own misery, but the worst part is that you still can't stop. The suicide attempts and self-injury look like action, the anger and the crying jags are extreme emotion. But the day to day is feeling so worn down that the thought of getting out of bed to shower is too much. And you know that this is an easy thing, that everyone in the world over the age of six can do it, and yet, you continue to lie in bed while people tell you that you're going to miss class, miss work, miss going out. And you care, but not enough.
Everything in depression feeds into itself; you can't be depressed because you're just lazy and selfish, so you resist treatment. Labeling yourself as depressed is just a way out, it's another excuse, another act of selfishness that takes away from the seriousness of the disease. You're so mired in self-hatred and pain and lethargy that you can't imagine another way of being; you convince yourself that this is normal, that the brief moments of happiness are all you'll ever get. You remember the happier you of the past and believe that that person is dead and gone, or you remember the you of the past and can only hate yourself more for all the things that have gone wrong.
You lie there, unable to do the simplest things, while everyone around you gives advice and means well, but you can tell that they don't understand why you can't just get up/clean your room/write your paper/answer email. You feel like an even greater failure. Or else you rage at yourself for lacking the willpower, for being a failure, for being wrongwrongwrong. Then you hate yourself even more for being a horrible, ugly person, even as you alienate the few people who are still sticking around. You want to make them see how awful you are, make them leave, even while you're desperate and lonely and terrified of being abandoned. You test people to make sure they'll stay, and nothing is ever good enough. You cry without knowing why.
There's so much self-destruction underlying this, there's so much self-hate. You hate yourself so much, not passionately, but with a dead, grey certainty, that anyone who sees anything positive about you must be deluded or stupid. You sabotage everything you do. Your brain is your worst enemy.
Sometimes it gets so bad that the only thing you can do to make it stop is to hurt yourself physically, to scratch or cut or drink, to distract yourself from the pain that your life has become. Sometimes it gets so bad that the only thing you can do to make it stop is to think about everything stopping, when the only way to not hurt is to not be. Sometimes you only fantasize about these things and shy away, and instead of this being a good thing, it's only another sign that you're not really depressed. Sometimes you read about these things and know that you aren't there yet, so you take it as a reason why you are just messed-up and not mentally ill. Sometimes you are there, and you take comfort in the cold planning, convince yourself that everyone you know would be better off if you were dead because your very existence wrecks everything.
And then, when you can't go through with it, that's yet another thing that you fucked up, not a reason for celebration, because your life isn't worth celebration.
Depression is a disease. It's the worst kind of disease, one that takes over your entire self and convinces you that it's the real you. It closes you off in your own self-contained world. It flips a switch in your head so that any criticism or frown means that you suck, that any praise only means that you will disappoint people later. It translates "I like you" to "I liked you the way you were and now that you're like this, I'll abandon you." It takes everything good and twists it. And then, after it's done all this to you, it convinces you that you aren't sick at all, that this is the world, that this is reality. Or even if you do realize that things aren't normal, you lack the energy or the desire to make things better, because you don't deserve it.
And the worst part is, even when you're armed with knowledge, the voice in your head still goes on and tries to convince you that you are worthless, takes anything around you or in you and turns it into a weapon.
More smart people write about depression:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/rachelmanija/10020.htmlhttp://www.livejournal.com/users/rachelmanija/104788.htmlhttp://www.livejournal.com/users/rachelmanija/107785.htmlhttp://www.livejournal.com/users/coffeeandink/298674.htmlhttp://www.livejournal.com/users/clementine13/47906.htmlIndex of "On Depression" posts![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}