Thoughts on Depression

Depression has been on my mind a fair bit of late, prompted by an excellent blog post by Steven Savage, over on Fan to Pro. I’ve battled depression my whole life; and while I’m aware that I’ve always been in the relatively shallow end of the sucking pool of hell that is depression, still it’s a topic close to my heart.

The absolute worst part of being depressed, for me, is feeling that you’re alone, and that nobody else can possibly understand the pain you’re going through and never will. So I dug through my own private files and updated a piece I wrote some years ago, and I’m taking a risk and posting it.

WHAT IS DEPRESSION?

Everyone has their own answer to that question. Here’s mine:

Depression is being scared to talk about how you feel. It’s knowing that when someone asks you “how are you doing?”, they don’t really want the answer. It’s what makes you smile when you feel like screaming, and it’s a strangling cord that makes you listen to everyone else’s troubles and never talk about your own pain. It’s believing that if you try to talk to someone about your pain, they’ll tell you to “snap out of it” and “you’re just too sensitive”. It’s being told that “everyone has ups and downs” – and while that’s true, it also sounds like “don’t bore me with your crap. I’m busy.”

It’s isolating, because if you can’t talk to anyone about your problems, after a certain point, you can’t talk to anyone at all about anything at all.

It’s going to therapy and twelve-step groups; haunting online chat groups, reading endless self-help books and researching all sorts of alternative healing systems – gathering up all the tools and resources – and still being miserable sometimes for no good reason.

It’s believing that you ought be to able to handle your emotions and behavior better than this. It’s seeing all your efforts work – for a while – and then lapsing into bad habits that erode their benefits. It’s constantly telling yourself what you’re doing wrong during the low times and being nervous about feeling good during the up times.

Depression is more than this; and it’s less than this.

It’s not an overwhelming constant, every moment of every day. It’s not something you think about all the time. It’s not something that rules or ruins your life completely; but it is something to factor in, like having a broken ankle or a sprained wrist.

You can fight it. You can learn to factor in strategies for dealing with it; you can learn to figure out what triggers it and what helps it. You can learn to be active about avoiding things, people, places, and situations that make the symptoms worse, even if that pisses some people off or loses you friends.

You can learn that you’re the one responsible for your own mental health. You can read and talk and study the lingo, but there comes a point when you have to pick up your ass and move it to where you want to be. Nobody’s going to do that for you. So you learn masking strategies, and convenient excuses, and ways to repair damage done during a lapse and the right apologies to soothe raw tempers; you forgive yourself as best you can for the wrong choices, and you move on. Moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, you can move on.

Depression is like a never ending battle, a fight that requires your heart and soul and every ounce of passion you can muster each and every round. It’s even similar to a job; a full-time-with-mandatory-overtime job, one we didn’t apply for, one we can’t quit, one with really, truly crappy pay and lousy benefits. And like any job, you can work at making it worse, or you can work at making it better.

From the other side of the line now, I can tell you: it does get better. And then it gets worse, and then it gets better, and on and on . . . but the neat thing is that as long as you’re working at it, the bottom of the pit keeps going up . . . or at least, it won’t go down. Which, some days, is almost as good.

For all the people now suffering through the hellish grinder of depression, listen to me: you do have a choice. You do have the strength. Even if you don’t believe in any aspect of God, believe in yourself . . . and know that when you have doubts, I believe in you, even if we’ve never met and never will. And in return, when I fall (and I know I will, as part of the inevitable cycle) . . . you can return the favor, and believe in me.