I used to come on here and get at people for not doing enough to help themselves through Depression. Now, I’m feeling it myself pretty badly, and I take back everything I said.
When this thing gets ahold of you, it’s so hard to mentally function. It’s Hell. The deep sense of hopelessness in itself is enough to make you think you’d be better off dead. SO much internal pain…
To those I gave a hard time to, I’m sorry.
Happy New Year
9 comments
Thanks for posting this. Your are so right about depression’s grip and depth of pain. I have come along way with easing depression but it has not been quick, or easy, or cheap, nor just one thing that has helped. More like “all of the above”. Thanks for affirming it’s affect on mental function and awful pain.
Finding a capable relatable useful therapist has been a big boost in giving me the encouragement to do a lot of that “all of the above” stuff that turns out to actually help.
Looks like Karma or whatever you call it has a funny way of striking back. Whatever the case, thank you for finally understanding what we go through I guess. It’s tough being in this situation and if it was as easy as telling us like those empty Hallmark Cards platitudes, we would have already done it. The lingering pain and the hopelessness of it all is what’s so damning about it.
From the outside, it looks like people are just being lazy, and not thinking about things they should be grateful for, or doing enough to help themselves. when you’re actually in the thick of it, standing in the eye of the hurricane, you realize just how wrong that outside perspective is. I thought I understood depression, but now that I feel it, I realize that I didnt understand anything at all.
So what got you sucked into depression if you don’t mind? I really liken depression like a black hole; once you get sucked in, it will be very hard to crawl back out.
To depression is like was at first possessive girlfriend and now she is an angry ex. She was there pretty much all my life, preventing me to see other children, then to ask for help, made me believe somehow I was special, doomed to live in a world where no one could ever understand me. In my teens I began to have physical symptoms and recurrent suicidal thoughts and she made me paranoid so that she could continue to be the only real thing in my life. Then I got myself into self harming behaviors and I whined a lot in a desperate attempt to get anyone’s attention and I enede up one month in a loony bin. That’s when the first fights really began. I realised I was wrong, something in me was broken and breaking me every day a bit more. I tried to push her out of my life and so she began to hurt even more to get back at me. Fighting depression on my own is a nightmare : it is a mixture of anxiety, absurdity, shame and incredible pain. Some people compare depression to cancer, and I think it is a very accurate idea of what depression is: a few parts of yourself that went south, make metastases and eventually kills you or if you are lucky get smaller but never completely dissappear.
Hey, some of the things you told other people are still valid (more or less). It’s just that now you have to do them when it feels like someone’s spent the night kicking your prefrontal cortex (for the thousandth night in a row), and all you want to do is curl up in a ball and cry, and you can’t see any of it ever getting any better no matter what you do, and you desperately want it all to just end.
But there’s still stuff you can do. It won’t reliably change how you feel, and it may seem utterly pointless. But if you’re going to stick around, then you may as well do it, with whatever energy and focus you can muster. That way at least we limit the amount of unnecessary pain we heap upon ourselves.
I hope it lifts for you soon.
Thank you, I hope things get better for you as well. Doing what I can and taking my own advice. Ironically, it feels a lot like beating myself up, because I do tell myself the same things. Hanging in there though, making sure to avoid doing nothing
Its very hard for someone to understand how bad depression is for someone else until they are deep in its grip