Shown below is a snippet of an article that talks about what depression feels like. If you’ve never experienced a depressive state, the article attempts to explain how it affects an individual. Depression is not a blanket-type of mental illness. It manifests itself in many different forms, changing like the wind. Those of us who live with it just ask you to try to understand it’s an illness that isn’t cured by thinking happy thoughts.
The descriptions Lubow uses to characterize various aspects of the throes of depression are valid. They capture how it might feel. Naturally, experiences vary from person to person.
This winter has been one of the most difficult I’ve experienced. Diagnosed with severe clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder in 1982, I’ve spent much of a lifetime learning how to live with it. Through a ton of counseling and judicious use of meds over the past 4+ decades, I’ve achieved a status quo level of functioning. I still ride the sketchy roller coaster of life with mental health challenges. The peaks and valleys just aren’t as high and low as they once were.
I’ve been a voracious reader since I first learned to read. Though it’s difficult for me to focus on any tomes relating to the field of psychology, I try and try again. Theories and research are fine, but talking to those who experience it daily is more meaningful in my opinion.
Unfortunately, people don’t want to talk about it. It raises issues of disbelief and discomfort amongst those who’ve never experienced true depression and anxiety. I hope you never do. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that depression either doesn’t exist or is easily “cured.” For many it will remain a lifetime challenge. “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” we’re told. Maybe. What hasn’t killed me gave me PTSD. So there’s that. Plus I can’t even begin to fathom what my always-elevated levels of anxiety have done to my body, along with the decades of meds. As Maya Angelou said, “Still I rise.”
My conscious thought is to battle my mindset each and every day. There are days when I just can’t bear to be around others. It’s too much of an effort on those days to “be normal.” Daily tasks may be overwhelming. And yet, I retreat to music, to books, to words, in order to restore some solace to my turbulent thinking.
I don’t want anyone’s pity or sorrow. In the last five years, I’ve lost the two people who truly recognized and believed in what I dealt with each day. They saw it and saw the toll it took. I no longer have that level of support. It’s difficult. We want to talk about it but very few want to hear it and even fewer believe it.
I’m just asking you to try to understand. Even accomplished, affable, amusing individuals, such as I, carry this with us 24/7. Don’t diminish us or patronize us.
“Depression is utterly isolating. There is terrible shame about the actions depression dictates, such as not accomplishing anything or snapping at people.
“Everything seems meaningless, including previous accomplishments and what had given life meaning. Anything that had given the person a sense of value or self-esteem vanishes.” Cynthia Lubow, Marriage and Family Therapist
“Here comes the rain again, falling on my head like a memory…”. Eurythmics
Stories Are For Eternity 