Living with depression isn't easy. I mean, that is a given, but sometimes as someone who lives with depression, it is hard for some people to understand what it really means. What makes it even more difficult is the fact that depression effects everyone differently. There are no two people who have the same exact case of depression. Symptoms of depression can vary from person to person, which can sometimes make it hard to even diagnose someone with depression. There is even such a thing as seasonal depression which means that a person only gets really depressed during a certain time of year (mostly winter) which is insane. Still, no matter how severe it is or when it happens, living with depression sucks.
I am an artist living with depression (which honestly isn't something that makes me special, but that is a different article for a different time) and sometimes I wonder if living with my depression is what makes my art better or worse. This makes me wonder if it is all worth it in the end or not. Still, even if depression makes my art better, there is still the fact that I find it hard to get up on certain days or just wash a dish.
Now, there are a lot of people who will just brush this off as laziness. "Oh, it is just another lazy millennial who doesn't want to work," you may think to yourself. Before you go any further with such ideas, allow me to shed a little bit of light on my life: I go to school at Emerson College, I wrote, published, and market my own novel, I am currently writing my second novel, I work a part time job that takes up most of the free time that is left behind from my classes and school work, and to top it all off, I work not one, but two internships. I do more than the average college student, so I am not exactly what one might call "lazy".
Nonetheless, it is understandable how one might see it as that way. There are days where I just lay in bed and stare at the ceiling without doing anything because it literally hurts me to lift my body up to do anything. There are also days where it is so bad that I just feel paralyzed and there is nothing that I can do about it. And who could forget the wonderful days where I disassociate completely and feel horridly numb?
Like I said, depression is different for everyone. There are some people who might have depression who feel none of what I described above. This is what makes diagnosing depression so hard for psychologists. Still, there is no doubt that living with depression makes everything a whole lot harder for people no matter what symptoms they may have. Depression is very real and it isn't always as treatable as people may think it is.
What a lot of people told me whenever I would start to have depressive episodes is that I should just go and do something that I love. I should write, I should take a hot shower, I should have a cup of tea, watch one of my favorite T.V shows, make a nice meal for myself, go outside, color, play with my makeup, look at cute pictures of dogs, call my mom, talk to a friend, anything. The fact of the matter is that none of that means anything if I just don't have the heart or the energy to even get myself out of bed.
Again, sometimes it is difficult for people to really understand what depression does to a person, and that is completely understandable. It is even hard for me to describe it, and I live with it every single day. Yet, the number one thing that I can tell anyone who has a friend or a family member or a loved one with depression, is that you need to be patient with this person. It is likely that they just feel alone and scared and hopeless. You may not know what they need right off the bat, and hell, they might not know exactly what they need either (half of the time, I don't even know what I need and this is something that I have had to deal with since I was in middle school or so). As long as you are patient with them, the storm will pass.
