"Make me someone new. Tell me what I do to rewrite this story. How long can I stay lost without a way to rewrite? I wish I could rewrite this story..." - SMASH

The creators of SMASH may have been writing more about changing your life and reinventing yourself but they accidentally nailed my exact daily thought process. It catches people off guard that I would change my life from start to finish if I had the option. It's not that I don't love my family or that I am not grateful for what I have. I just really truly would rather be anyone else. I would give anything to be able to give God my critiques and ask for a second draft that's a little less bleak. Really I'd just do anything to not be depressed.

"Depressed." Why does that feel like such an empty term now? I think it's partly because of people who use the term so loosely but also because "depressed" has become almost a state-of-being more than an emotion. It doesn't encapsulate how bad it really is anymore. A lot of that, in my opinion, is because of how romanticized depression has become. So many people have no clue what depression is really like.

Depression is a mixture of wanting everything to stop and the fear that if everything stopped you'd still be stuck feeling like this somehow in whatever afterlife you believe in. It's taking antidepressants and still struggling because your thought pattern is so warped that you don't even know how to think positively about yourself. It's wanting so desperately to love yourself but not being able to see any of what they see.

Depression is not cute. It is not "trendy." It is not tragically beautiful. It is not a fantasy. Though the media paints mental illness in this fantasy-like lens, the reality of living with depression is much less "Twilight" and a lot more "Cabin In The Woods" but all the monsters are you and all the people controlling the experiment are also you. There's crying, sure. And there's staring out rainy windows listening to sad music like you see in all the ads for antidepressants. But, when you take off the rose colored glasses, it's darker and lonelier and colder. It's sitting in the bathtub in the dark crying while the shower runs over you. It's feeling like the world regrets your existence as much as you do. It's getting up and going to work and being completely fine and then coming home brain dead from exhaustion. Depression is like living with your worst enemy stuck inside your head. Every time someone looks at you wrong or comes off as rude, it adds fuel to the fire depression has built. "If people who don't even know you think you're awful then you really must be the worst." "People can tell just by looking at you that they don't like you. You should just do them all a favor and get it over with."

"And even when your hope is gone, move along. Move along just to make it through." -All American Rejects

I like to refer to my time not on medication as "brute forcing my way through life." I feel that it accurately represents how it feels to live each day struggling to just not kill yourself. It's like when you go into a boss battle severely under leveled but you can't level up until you defeat the boss so you just mash every button possible and hope that brute force is enough to win. If you were thinking logically , you'd go into that fight with a bunch of potions or extra lives and power ups to make your attacks better. But potions and power ups don't guarantee you'll win and antidepressants don't fix your depression. I'd still rather take antidepressants and make the fight easier but it still is gonna take strategy and a little brute force here and there to actually win.

I don't know where the shame on taking anti-depressants and such came from. I don't know who decided that taking meds for a heart condition was okay but meds for ADHD was taboo. I guess it goes hand in hand with people who think the cure to depression is to "stop being sad" but I digress.

I feel like a fraud sometimes because I never developed that shame. I was never shy about my depression and I have never felt embarrassed or ashamed of taking my medication. Maybe it's because I was too busy feeling shame for being alive or maybe I accepted it early on just because it finally explained why I felt the way I do. I am thankful I didn't feel the need to hide my mental illness even if people still continued to pretend it wasn't there. I know so many people don't feel like they can tell their family they're depressed or feeling suicidal and my heart breaks for every single person who is suffering in silence.

I don't know why I'm writing this or really who it's for but if you're seeing it, it must be for you! You are loved. You are so incredibly wonderful and perfect and the light you add to the world can't be replaced. You are not alone. Whether you're brute-forcing your way through life right now or you're getting a little help, you're valid and there is NO shame in needing help should you choose to seek it out.

"I hope you don't mind, I hope you don't mind that I put down in words how wonderful life is while you're in the world" -Elton John