Something that everyone has in common is that at several points in our lives, we’ve felt like, frankly, utter crap. We’ve all burst into tears after a bad day, tragic event, or tough time: it’s normal, and it makes sense too.
But what do you say about yourself when nothing particularly bad could happen, but somehow, you just feel misery for months, years on end- to the point where it consumes you and weighs down every waking moment of your existence? What many will refuse to discuss and adamantly keep taboo encompasses a very real, emotional, raw, and unfortunately, very common illness: clinical depression, perhaps unknowingly, impacts many of us and the people we know. To be utterly honest, I am one of those people, which to those who know me, may even seem unbelievable. However, it is because depression has been so stigmatized and tabooed that it became of such import to encourage raw, honest, unashamed conversations about mental illness, with others and with yourself, and to be hopeful in a time characterized by despair.
Like many millennials, for the longest time, the word depression repulsed me: it stuck in my head as this attention-seeking, overrated, romanticized self-diagnosis that trended in middle school and continues to be tossed around as a lofty descriptor. With a word that carried so heavy in both emotional weight and distasteful stigma, I refused to become just another "depressed" teenager, and resented any time the truths of my illness overflowed from mouth, fearing that it only translated into spineless whines. How could I have the audacity to say I was depressed when, as I readily acknowledged, my life was not all too bad at all? Surrounded by family and friends, I was loved. With a roof over my head, clean clothes, an education, and food whenever I want, I am privileged- and that’s more than many people can say.
However, the fatal mistake in that kind of mentality that depression a clinical, nonexclusive illness that is rooted in the body’s insufficient production of hormones. It’s physiological, inheritable, uncontrollable, and certainly unforgiving. Why would anyone in their right mind choose to feel this way? Depression breeds uninvited, silent suffering: the shame, isolation, and anxiety brutally takes toll behind the scenes. Many will repress everything: fearing judgment and faking happiness to the point of existential crisis. In feverish migraines and frenzied panic attacks, the rationale blurs into a hazy, nauseated mess where bad decisions glow in the dark, and the fatigue keeps you stuck in a purgatory.
And everyone will defer you to something-serving blind prescriptions of this and that. But the sad truth is, there’s no bonafide cure to gain happiness so long as the core problem is so desperately avoided. You could spill your choked-up life story to dozens of people: an internet forum, the comments on a YouTube video, a therapist, your own family and friends, but no one will completely get it and magically glue you back together again, leave you validated and whole. I spent a couple years in therapy hating myself, my therapist, and my family, because I was getting nowhere. I pushed away friends and filled journals upon journals with thoughts so streamlined and smeared in black inked self hatred from cover to cover year after year. After months of struggling to help me, people soon figured out the “real” me was nothing they expected: just a Mobius strip, a broken record, hell to be around. And the worst part? I couldn't even deny or blame them. No matter what or how hard I tried, I was stuck on a paradox of constant lethargy, awful headaches, and pointless, shaking paranoia. Still, I saw depression as some sort of made up, manipulative excuse for being nothing but a worthless failure, and I might as well continue living my life pleasing others if never myself.
A lot of the time, people will compare life to a metaphor. Life’s like a box of chocolates, its ups and downs like a roller coaster, its hardships like climbing mountains. But honestly, life can’t be simplified into a metaphor. Depression is so terribly complex, and this “road” to happiness is invisible with no distinct end goals or even motivations. Happiness might not come after years, decades of "faking it ‘til you make it.” It’s not guaranteed to arrive like an enlightened epiphany after 34 months of therapy, or 62 pill bottles of Zoloft.
When it comes down to it, you are the only one who knows exactly how you feel, and the ironic thing is you may be the only one who continues to blame yourself, and refuses to admit there's a problem at all, defensively staying sedentary in melancholy because the thought of admittance and change seems even scarier than the reality of depression.
However, identifying as depressed is not about self pity, but about self awareness and ultimately, self acceptance. The first step is acknowledging there is a psychological problem with how your mind works. And that’s nothing to be apologetic, ashamed, or embarrassed about. You have to believe that there is a way to be happy one day, that you can live to be at a point where you look back and won’t even believe how far you've come. To finally feel as positive and kind and happy as people always saw you as.
The first step is hard as hell: it’s understanding that this seemingly bottomless depression is actually very temporary. As Silja Björk Björnsdóttir candidly explains in her phenomenal TED Talk, it's being able to break the societal and self-depreciative stigmas and turn toward self-forgiving attitudes. It’s believing in a brighter future, believing that you can and deserve to get there, that everyday, whether you know it or not, you are making progress.
After recently rereading my journals and looking back, I almost can’t believe how nearly too far gone I was, and realize that somewhere along the way, thought I simply cannot pin point when or why, I moved on. The version of me just two years ago would have never dreamed that I would feel so much genuinely and consistently healthier, happier, and optimistic. I look forward to the fact that it’s not too late to change my life, that there are people I haven’t met who will love me and who I will inspire, and that I haven’t experienced the best days of my life yet.
We’re growing as we go, and there is always hope. Life will get better, but only if you let it.
