Depression: A Short Description
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Why am I writing and sharing this short essay? In the hope that it can help others better understand the experience of living with depression. I want to help normalize talking about depression, and normalize depression being seen at all. One way to do so is to talk and write about it. I’m choosing to do so with a therapy technique known as radical openness, something discussed in DBT, CPT, and other therapies.
Often when people hear someone is depressed, they don’t stop and think of what that experience must really be like. We are usually flooded with stereotypes when we hear the word depression. It’s unclear and vague. What does it mean exactly, to be depressed? What does it look and feel like mentally, physically, and emotionally?
Essays that describe individual experiences with depression such as the one I am sharing today, can nuance our discourse around it. Having said that, my experience is my own, and to say that everyone experiences depression in the same way would be a gross generalization. It looks different from day to day for the same person not to mention how everyone individually experiences it.
I do believe that the more experiences of depression people can see and read about, the more compassion we can cultivate as a society and community that is full of people prone to depression. We can be kinder to ourselves, our neighbors, our fellow citizens, and fellow human beings. Depression is universal. But the cultural and societal context of depression morphs its shape and how those of us who have it get to live with it.
Working class depression is a strange beast. Being able to go to work seems like an oxymoron to someone who is in the throes of a depressive episode, but just because you are able to get yourself to work doesn’t mean you are able to participate in the work. Some of us get lucky, and the depression lifts before a major project deadline. For others it often means losing their job and access to the few resources they had.
At a time when narratives and art around mental health are being suppressed, it is our responsibility as artists to keep writing and sharing.
It’s back.
It always comes back.
It’s never not there to be honest but now I feel its weight.
It feels as if every atom in my body is fighting not to succumb to gravity.
The desire to close your eyes and never open them.
I feel nothing.
Completely disconnected from my senses.
No appetite. No joy.
Bones aching.
I struggle speaking.
I struggle thinking.
Everything is a struggle.
Days and nights come and go without any real sense of time having passed.
You feel nothing and everything all at once—fighting to keep it together every minute.
Being social is agony.
Performing a functioning human in front of colleagues is so hard you pass out from exhaustion as soon as you clock out.
Everyone around you is better.
Of course, they are.
No one else is wasting their life away, taking up space, and leaving an unnecessary carbon footprint on the planet.
You spent the last 15 years of your life paralyzed unable to feel or remember your own life.
When you come up for air, you feel miles behind your peers.
Nothing to show for and barely making just about anything.
The one question that comes up during this time is, why?
Why keep doing this?
A harsh little voice chimes in, “there isn’t enough time to start over or to catch up.”
It keeps going, taunting me, “You wasted your life away.”
I exhale in self-defeat.
Maybe it’s right.
Maybe there isn’t anything more I can do here?
Of course I will never make up for those 15 years of not reading or writing (enough).
Seeing yourself as a zombie, something out of Dawn of the Dead, doesn’t fill one with joy and sense of worth.
You instead feel immense shame and loss.
Loss for time you will never get back and shame of how little you have done or accomplished.
That’s it.
Nothing seems worth doing.
Nothing feels worth doing.
Nothing is worth doing.
For how little you feel, your heart is constantly racing.
Your chest so tight you have problems breathing—as if someone is squeezing it shut from the inside.
Your limbs feel heavy.
Your head feels heavy on your neck.
Your shoulders slouch forward as your chest is tightening with every passing minute.
You need to remind yourself to take a deep breath to make sure you can still breathe.
Sometimes gasping for air.
Yawning in an attempt to help yourself catch a breath.
It works—but not for long.
Rinse and repeat.
Get up!
Brush your teeth!
Go to work!
A voice is constantly yelling at me; commanding me to obey.
It’s authoritative.
It’s giving me a command to follow and so I do, barely.
Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, months into years.
I can’t enjoy any of it.
It is time passing me by as I try to survive until the following day.
Why keep going if I can’t remember any of it?
The same question is back.
If I can’t experience anything to a point of it imprinting onto my psyche at least the conscious part.
Why am I constantly grieving the time passed?
I can’t enjoy the present.
How utterly ridiculous.
Depression is worrying not living.
Not the helpful caring kind of worry but the destructive internal worry that gives us no rest and joy.
The all consuming worry that strips us of our lives and purpose.
This!
This is how I live.
If you can call it living.
This is the state I am in the majority of the time;
Fighting;
Pleading;
Resisting.
Shut up.
Stop complaining.
It is what it is.
Just wait.
The fog will clear.
Nothing is permanent.
If you have a favorite poem, short story, novel, quote, paragraph, or book on the topic, I would love to hear about it!
A brutal read. Does a brilliant job of transporting someone who (mercifully) doesn't suffer with depression into the experience. Thank you for sharing. Sending love from Bulgaria.
So sorry that you and others exist with and struggle through this cruel disease. Please persevere. And yes, your fans in Austin miss you and care about you.