Now, let me be clear- there is a huge cavern of difference between "feeling sad" and depression. Feeling sad is motivated by some occurrence, and anyone can suffer from it. People can suffer from profound sadness over any number of things. You can be sad because a relative died, and you can be sad because a hurricane devastated a group of people.
Depression is different.
Now, I cannot begin to vouch for anyone else's feelings, but I feel I'm pretty good at telling the difference between when I'm feeling sad and when I am suffering from genuine depression.
I was sad when my grandfather died last spring. I was depressed while living in Portland.
And I don't need to go into the minutiae of what my experience was like while being depressed, except that it was all-encompassing and overwhelming. I felt like I could not get out of bed, and what was worse, that no one cared whether I got out of bed or not.
And it builds on itself. I stopped going to class, I stopped doing homework, I made excuses for not socializing with my friends. I put off life itself because it was simply too much for me. I blew off my life, and shit built up until I felt like there was no way I could wade back into the thick of it. There were too many essays, too much homework, too great of a burden.
Everything just turned into one ugly, painful spiral, and I hated myself for it. I didn't understand how other people managed it so easily, when getting out of bed was an accomplishment for me. I cried in the shower, I cried myself to sleep, I cried walking back to my dorm after the few classes I did manage to attend.
I'm not going to try to illustrate that kind of self-loathing that I (and my guess is others) felt while in this great little shit-hole, the kind where you look in the mirror and hate everything you see, and everything you represent. If you've felt it, you know what I mean. If you haven't, you're lucky, and you're not about to gain any understanding from a silly little blog like mine.
Depression is like addiction- no one can tell you you've got a problem. No one can tell you to get better. You have to be willing to get help, and to help yourself. And that's how it ended- I helped myself. I started by forcing myself out of bed, forcing myself to work on homework, study for tests, go buy groceries. I put myself in that hole, and I dug myself back out of it. On a scale of the most painful experiences I have had, this was by far the worst, but I survived. In fact, I more than survived- I got myself out of Portland, transferred to a school I love, found a degree I love, and moved as far away from that place, mentally, as I could. I'm not making light of it; getting through that year was an enormous show of will power.
And that is not how I would advocate doing it. Regardless of my personal thoughts towards psychology, nothing is more useful when you're in a hole than a good therapist. I know that having a therapist is sometimes regarded as a personal failing, but get over it. If you need help, you need help. In my case, I forced myself back onto a track that worked for me, but that's not the way to do it for other people. Just as every individual's problems are unique, the solutions also vary.
The aforementioned blogger's turning point came when she realized she had no more effort left to give to being depressed. My own turning point came when, after talking about how awful living in Portland was making me feel with a friend, he replied that I didn't have to live there. He told me there was no reason for me to stay. A shocker, I know, but in my private spiral, it never occurred to me that I could leave.
So, I did leave. I got better. And I realized that I'd learned more about myself in that one year of hell than I had over the last 18 years. I found out that I don't need validation from other people, so long as what I'm doing is important to me. I found out that I will always have the ability to change something that's got me doubting myself. Most importantly, I found out that I'm a hell of a lot tougher, and more capable, than I ever thought I was. While I was stuck in that dark nonsense, I couldn't see my life possibly getting better. Now, on the other side of it all, I can see that nothing bad ever stays bad, but it will only change if it is forced to change. Even though that was possibly the worst year of my life, I would never go back and change any part of it.
I am me because of it.
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