The news has been particularly difficult to read, watch, or stay aware of in any form. Minor breaks from it don’t help, because the reality of what we’re facing doesn’t go away because I turn off the TV and step away from the newspapers for a few days.
I am 34. I have seen the popular vote winner twice in my lifetime rejected in favor of someone fundamentally unfit for office. The Republicans are gleefully sprinting over the line of authoritarianism and not only don’t care, but are openly insulting, attacking, and stoking hate for those who would oppose them. My generation will earn less than its parents (the first to do so in nearly a century), and that’s especially terrifying for me because I come from poverty. We were the first generation to live with the reality that we could be shot and killed in our schools at any time, the first to realize that while our parents and grandparents SAID they loved us, they didn’t love us enough to protect us. Their right to buy an AR-15 whenever they wanted as fast as possible was more important than letting us go to school without wondering if today was the day we’d die there.
I will live long enough to live through the worst of climate change. I’ve heard the people in power mock, deride, and insult my generation for wanting something to be done about it. They showered us with contempt during Occupy Wall Street, they continue to pretend climate change isn’t real, that student debt isn’t a problem, that a tattered safety net is my fault and I don’t deserve it anyway.
I only got health insurance a couple years ago, but I can’t afford most of the medicine my doctor prescribed me. It’s $3,000 a month, and my insurance refuses to cover them. My antidepressants are generics, and quadrupled in cost recently….for some reason. No reason is given, none is needed; what are you gonna do about it? Pay up or piss off. I worked on an ingrown toenail for over a year as it slowly got infected and threatened to go septic, because no doctor would treat me without insurance unless I could pay, up front, their outrageous uninsured prices. I eventually had to cut it out myself.
Despite all this, I don’t consider Donald Trump, Republicans, the medical insurance or pharmaceutical industries, the gun lobby, the fossil fuel industries, or stochastic terrorists my greatest threat. No, that is reserved for one person, the one person who spends all day following me around, doing their level best to get me killed and ensure nobody is prosecuted for the crime, that my family gets no justice and no closure.
That person is me.
I write this because, even though there’s no shortage of efforts to inform people what clinical depression IS, nobody seems to truly “get” it. Even those closest to me still seem to have an incorrect impression. I also have noticed a lot of stigma to depression and mental health issues, and I want to do my part to fight that. Consider it a sort of “coming out”, I suppose, if I may borrow that term.
People think it’s being sad (you’re “depressed”, right? Isn’t that feeling sad?). They think it’s being mopey, and down, maybe crying. Sure, it can be those things, but that’s like saying that “cancer” is just feeling weak and not having as much energy or appetite. It’s missing the major symptom inside that’s doing the real damage, conflating temporary behaviors that may come and go with the condition itself.
Worst, they think that since it’s all in your head, that it’s easy to fix. Just have a better attitude, think positive, do something you enjoy to get your mind off things, and so forth. That’s what works for them when they’re sad, after all, and they just want to help. They might “get” that it’s “more sad” than usual, but that just means you need to push a bit harder.
Well, it’s not like that.
Imagine, if you will, that sitting on your shoulder is a tiny clone of yourself. You cut your hair, it cuts its hair; you grow older, so does it; it is you, and it knows what you know, hears what you hear, sees what you see. Nobody else in the world has such an intimate view of your life and experiences, so its words carry extra weight, the same way words from a trusted friend or family member carry more weight than a stranger’s. In the same way, this little homunculus is even MORE trusted than your close friends and family: it’s not just close to you, it IS you.
Now, imagine that it hates you with every fiber of its tiny being. It wants nothing more than for you to be ground down and destroyed. You wake up and it starts off by telling you there’s no reason to get out of bed, your life is pointless. You have nothing to offer anyone, best to stay in bed and away from everyone else.
You go to the bathroom to get cleaned up and groomed, it tells you how ugly you are, how fat, and its all your fault. You made yourself look this way, how can you force the world to look at you? Nobody deserves that.
You get dressed, it tells you how awful your clothes are, how you now look even fatter and uglier. You have terrible taste in clothes, it reminds you; it carefully points out any flaws, defects, problems with them. Everyone will notice, it assures you, how much of a slob you are.
It does this all day; every compliment you might get is questioned by it: they must be joking or sarcastic, or perhaps they just want to get something from you and are trying to manipulate you by pretending to be nice. It frames everything in the most negative manner possible. There is nothing you can say or do to silence it or prove it wrong. There is nothing too obvious or simple for it to twist and convolute and turn against you.
This is your life, your constant companion who tells you all day long how awful you are, and how much better everyone else would be without you. It assures you nobody will miss you, that perhaps they’ll even be better off without you. It sucks all the joy out of the things you enjoy doing, until you find yourself just sitting around aimlessly, unable to find the motivation even to do the things you love. Given its way, it would have you curl in bed and lay there forever, just hating yourself until you are no longer anyone’s problem. Oh, except for the people who have to come haul your corpse away, you insensitive jerk; why can’t you die in the woods where you won’t end up ruining someone's evening?
That’s all difficult enough, and maybe you even understand that much. But, the most insidious part of all is how relentless it is, how unyielding. It can turn any victory into defeat, any joyous occasion into one of sorrow, guilt, and self-loathing.
It’s not just that it won’t be silent, that it won’t stop trying to tear you down, it’s that NOTHING will be sufficient to prove it wrong. It blinds you to your achievements and turns reasons to celebrate into reasons to worry and be ashamed. It poisons relationships and ruins your ability to trust others; God only knows how many budding friendships I’ve let it kill by convincing me not to bother calling or reaching out to people because there’s no way they could REALLY like me.
I hated myself for being too unattractive, repulsive, and distasteful to ever find someone that could love me and share their life with me. Then, after I got married, it seamlessly switched to telling me that instead now I was a terrible husband and was ruining my wife’s life by making her deal with me and cursing her to an inevitable divorce.
You can learn to live with it, to try and remind yourself that it’s just the words of an enemy and shouldn’t be trusted or believed, you can even occasionally fight against it enough to get your head above the clouds of despair and catch a glimpse of sunlight. But, it’s all temporary. Eventually, the moment passes, you sink back down, and its endless monologue in your head continues.
You spend your life trying to ignore it and live, until it wins or you die. That’s depression. I wish I could end here with some advice about what you can do to help, but I honestly don’t know. If you’re suffering from it as well, you’re not alone, and don’t do anything stupid. Even if you don't believe anyone will notice or care, you're wrong. I assure you, you are. I know it's hard, but you can do one more day. We all can, if we try.
If you know someone who is suffering, I don’t know what to tell you, except that it’s not something you can just cheer them up or fix with some kind words. They might appreciate the gesture (I know I do), but that tiny version of themselves is still right there, waiting for you to finish so it can remind them that you didn’t really mean it. I don’t think I need to tell you which one a person with depression is more likely to believe.
To anyone worried about my safety, I can assure you I’ll be fine. I’ve dealt with this since I was 14, and while things were very dangerous for a long time in hindsight, I’ve learned to at least keep suicidal urges at bay. You actually get pretty good at faking being in a normal or good mood, so most people don’t even notice. I have always received comforting words here on Daily Kos the few times my feelings of despair were greater than normal, and I do believe a community like this is probably the best thing you can find when you’re depressed. Thank you all for your kind words in the past, and possibly future. I’m glad I found this place, and I hope I’ve given you a window into what it’s like, so you’ll understand why your kind words never seem to be enough. It’s not that they’re not appreciated, it’s that we have someone else saying a lot more unkind words for a much larger part of the day.
I’ll be launching my own website in the near future, as a result of a project I’ve been working on with local activists for the past few months. I’ll be posting updates once I have more details, and to announce when it goes live. If you’d like to help support my writing, you can donate or subscribe at www.patreon.com/…