The 6 BEST Things About Living With Depression

This list is satirical and very snarky if the tone wasn't obvious, there's very little in the way of positives I can draw from living with major depressive disorder.

Putting that in the opening paragraph is important given how many people who don't deal with this will latch onto a rather baity title and shriek about "romanticising depression", being unable to read the rest of the article as their immediate reaction will be proven wrong and you can't get outrage clicks that way. However I might be able to fit one small positive. Anyway, depression's great isn't it? Really does improve the quality of your life in so many different ways.

Here's a list of the ways it has, the things I've noticed, most snarky jabs, some positives though to show I'm not a complete Eeyore.

1. Everything Takes That Much More Effort

When I say everything, I mean everything you could be doing. Waking up? If it was a struggle before, ho boy it's about to get worse, especially if you add medication to the mix. Meeting your daily obligations, keeping a routine, trying to achieve self actualisation through doing cool stuff? That deadly combination of physical fatigue and brain fog will fuck you over in that area, which is especially problematic when it comes to the area of recovery. It requires diet change, exercise, getting your hygiene in check and shit together in general when you feel like there's a thousand tiny knives stabbing you every day.

2. It's An Individual Experience (Well Obviously There's The Outside Factors That Influence It But That's Not What I Mean Here)

What I mean by that is the manner in which your depression manifests itself, the causes of it, the symptoms you present, that's all an individual experience. What that means is that even though someone can have a vague idea of what it's like, or even be a fellow person with it, they're not really gonna understand what it's like. Some people with it who can hold a job are gonna look down on those who can't, given how our society puts production to make other people millions above all else. People just won't get everything about it, and it ain't always a stick you can slap them with, but it does make things hard when you need to keep cancelling plans or end up in a spiral on a night out.

3. Every Bad Thing Gets That Much Worse

The negative feedback loop of horrible thoughts, the way your brain weaves disparate strands of information into epic narratives of awfulness? Yeah that's gonna make mountains out of molehills, I don't say that in a way that makes light of whatever you're going through, what that means is that objectively small things can set off massive spirals. This can be messing up rolling a smoke, not doing as well as you thought on a test, seeing someone you didn't want to see, anything really. It's not fun lads 1/10 do not recommend.

4. You're Better Able To Relate To Sad Songs

I guess if I wasn't horrifically miserable for most of my life I wouldn't have gotten into a lot of my favourite music. Stuff like Elliott Smith, Bedwetter, Counterparts, the Microphones, Have A Nice Life, Low, Giles Corey, Eels, Saetia, Raein, Envy to name but a few. The melancholy nature of the music, the heartbreaking crescendos, the lyrics written seemingly just for you. Then again perhaps it'd be nice to just listen to normal music, able to speak to any random person you might encounter about your faves instead of skulling a bottle of wine and listening to I Don't Like Shit I Don't Go Outside for the thousandth time.

5. You Lose Interest In All The Things You Used To Love

You stop keeping up with new music, everything new isn't as good or relatable as whatever slice of misery you've currently got on repeat. You've no longer got the attention span for reading, watching films or tv shows, going outside when it's not an absolute necessity, seeing friends. Your hobbies are pointless because it takes up too much energy and you'll never be able to do them well enough for there to be any point to them.

6. Your Sense Of The Long Term Is Gone Out The Window

You can't see into the future, you can't see things getting better in any meaningful way. Recovery feels like nothing more than a long, stony road walked barefoot, full of false starts when you could just be sitting in your room drinking and watching shitty documentaries again. They might not be healthy coping mechanisms but they still work. Friends tell you to try and get better, but to you getting better just means being sad but functional, still alive when you're ruled being alive as not being a positive thing. Maybe they're genuinely concerned about you, maybe they just want to feel like a good person by throwing that advice out, in your diseased head it's hard to tell. It's fucking great.

So there y'all go, 6 great ways depression makes your life 110% better, not an ounce of sarcasm to be found here folks.