These days it’s become pretty easy to figure out what’s wrong with you. Stomachache? WebMD. Funny feeling on your face? Mayo Clinic. Uncontrollable trips to the bathroom? Even Oxford Dictionary will tell you what it all means. A lot of the times it’s pregnancy. Come on now, fatigue, nausea, and cravings? What else could it possibly be? I’m practically a doctor, except for the fact that I lack a degree and extensive training– but I have everything I could possibly need to know at the touch of my fingertips. Until I didn’t. Sadness had never been a disease for me. It was more like a temporary cloud that followed me home. I would go to sleep and wake up to the sun, dried off from a night of crying and stuffing myself with ice cream. It was never anything that I had to look up. But then something changed. Sadness started to stay for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner, too. The whole week. Month. Year. Years. It wasn’t that I was always down, but it just became harder to be happy. And when you’re not happy, you want to find the reason why– but nobody ever told me that depression was a thing. It was just a feeling– it had always been just a feeling. Until it wasn’t. Depression came in like a best friend who would never leave you alone and it became a monster that grew inside. It brought its friends along too. Anxiety. Hate. Anger. To make room for all of them, it pushed my heart to the side. And love just shrunk. Love for myself died faster than anything else. I despised the way I looked, how I acted– I hated how I was so sad all the goddamn time. And suddenly, I didn’t know what I was up against anymore. Turns out there was a lot written about it on the Internet, but it didn’t clarify things any better than all those pregnancy symptoms did. It didn’t make sense– mental illness does not make sense. Why couldn’t I shake this feeling off? It was a boulder sitting on my chest. Every attempt at getting better just made me sink deeper into the ground. Every ‘I’m fine’ pushed me one step closer to the edge. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I couldn’t eat. Seeing other people took up too much energy and I just wanted to be empty and hidden and cut off. Nothing hurts like this. An attack from within. A disease impenetrable by antibodies. Not even medicine satisfies you because the side effects and the notion that you need an artificial source just to feel human again sucks. I don’t exactly know how it happened, but I found myself recovering. Don’t get me wrong, I still suffer from it today, but with something like depression, you won’t find a cure online or from your doctor or a pharmacist– you take baby steps. It starts with telling somebody that you outgrew the word sadness and it has become something more. And from there you find support, make the choice to get up in the morning and take a shower, relearn how to love the things that had been taken from you, open yourself up to the idea that you are worth something, and accept that even if there is no obliterating depression, there is getting better. This isn’t a success story meant to tell you that if I can do it, you can do it too– like I said, I’m still in the process of finding my way back to being okay. The point is, mental illness is so real. The imaginary monsters that once lived underneath your bed have manifest in reality and climbed into your head. But none of this invalidates who you are, and it doesn’t mean that this is all you’ll ever be. Every day that you feel worthless, every self-loathing spark that burns your skin, every night you cry yourself to sleep is not your fault. You never did anything wrong but depression doesn’t look at its victims–it just exists. And we don’t exactly know a sure way to fight it, all we know is that we can. You can scour all the world for the right answers, but you still might not find the reasons why or how it ever got so bad. But that doesn’t matter– the only thing that matters is you. So maybe we’ll never have it all figured out. Maybe we’ll hurt until raindrops taste like bruises and every sidewalk crack is a scar. Maybe our hearts will never forget the way they were pressed against our ribcages, dying with every beat against our bodies. But that means nothing. Yeah, it’s going to be a huge part of our live and something we have to force ourselves to deal with, but there is an end game. If we could fight to win back our smiles, our laughter, our joy, our friends and family, our hobbies, our achievements, our dreams, our passions, and our love– we don’t need to know the details of why we felt broken in the first place. When you’re depressed, nobody is going to tell you how to get out of it. It only matters that you do. That you don’t let it kill you. WebMD and Mayo Clinic? Leave those to the people who want to have pregnancy scares every other day. Give yourself the time and effort to get better. Whatever it takes and whatever works. Depression isn’t the important one here. It’s you.
I never understood my depression but I learned something from it (via ink-trails)
