I’m not sure when depressed and sad became synonyms, but I’d like to start a movement to end this mismatched relationship. I’ve been sad. I’ve been depressed. I’ve been sad because I’m depressed. But they are two very different states of mind. When I’m sad I feel grief. Sometimes I cry. I can identify the reason. Maybe my dog died. Maybe a relationship ended. Sadness is a real feeling that hits me hard, but I always know where it’s coming from and I know that, eventually, it will pass. But depression...depression is something so much different. When I’m depressed I’m not feeling grief. I’m not feeling anything. Nothing. My heart feels like an impenetrable fortress. My mind is in a constant haze. I don’t care about things that would usually make me sad. I don’t care about things that would usually make me happy. I don’t care about anything.
At first, it’s almost empowering:
NOTHING CAN HURT ME!
Hurl your trials and tribulations at me!
It’s just water off a duck’s back.
But eventually it starts to eat at me:
Why doesn’t anything feel good anymore?
Didn’t laughter used to feel better than this?
How do I show them I care if I can’t feel it?
And then it causes despair:
It feels like I have to fake being human.
I can’t get close to anyone because I am so busy pretending to feel.
Will it be like this forever?
I get so desperate to feel that I pile up all of the things that used to bring me joy:
Dates! All the dates! Orgasms make me feel good!
Let’s throw a party! Parties are fun!
Music! I want to play it. I want to listen to it! I want to go watch it!
And then I cancel all of these things because they aren’t making me feel good, and I don’t have the emotional energy to do them, anyway. As a matter of fact, most days I have trouble wrangling up the motivation to leave the house. I haven’t showered in 4 days. Maybe 5. I joke that the dirty hippie in me is taking over. Or that I’m just lazy. Or that it’s too cold to get naked. But the truth is that I just don’t want to move.
So I start medicating.
Alcohol makes me feel. Oh boy, does it make me feel. By my third drink I’m crying. By my fourth I’m laying on the floor in a puddle of despair. By my fifth I’m contemplating…
No. No more drinking. Not when I’m alone, anyway. I can’t risk another...incident.
Marijuana! That’s fun, right? At least, it used to be. Now it’s become a crutch. It puts me in a good enough mood to interact with people, but then I worry that my friends will grow weary of being around someone who is constantly stoned. It keeps me from dipping down into despair, but I can’t do anything productive when I’m using it. So yes, it helps me get my head above water, but I’m still stuck in the middle of this pool and I’m not going anywhere. I’m just floating here. Pointlessly. Uselessly. What kind of existence is this?
I need help.
Someone please throw me a lifesaver.
So I start talking about it. With anyone I encounter. All the time. When someone casually asks me, “How are you?” I can’t just respond with the socially acceptable, “Fine.” Occasionally I can muster up an, “OK.” But usually it turns into an explanation of how I’ve been dipping into a dark hole of depression lately and it’s surprising that I made it out of the house to interact with people and I’m sure things will turn around soon and maybe one of these days I’ll talk to a professional about it and...oh, um...how are you doing? And now, when I think back to all the conversations I’ve had over the past few weeks, I can’t think of a single one during which I didn’t bring up my depression. Don’t I have anything else to talk about? Why would anyone want to be around me right now? Even I don’t want to be around me.
And that is depression. That is my life right now. That has increasingly become my life over the past three years. That has become the ONLY thing in my life over the past three months. At this point I can’t even remember what it was like not to be this way. I don’t remember what it was like to feel true joy. I don’t remember what it was like to feel connected to the people around me. I don’t remember what it was like to be in love. All I remember is the idea that life used to feel better than this.
So this is the story of my journey to remember the girl I used to be and my fight to reclaim my love for life. I hope it will have a happy ending.
