If you have read my last article on depression you would already know that I have suffered from, what I believe to be, clinical depression all my life. I talked about the lack of feeling, the darkness that consumes you, and the unwilling addiction you have to your own depression. When I say addiction, I truly mean it. It gives you a loss of hope, a loss of wanting help, a loss of caring at all, so why would you want to get better when it was the one thing that made you be able to walk through the trenches of life without caring?

If you have never suffered from depression then I don’t believe you would truly understand what I’m saying. I, myself, can see how it may seem silly. Why wouldn’t someone want to be happy? The answer is quite simple actually. When you are happy, something always comes along to ruin it. You won’t know what, who, when, or where; it will just hit you out of nowhere and all of a sudden all that happiness vanishes. There is always a downside to the upside of happiness: the sadness after it is taken from you.

Living with depression also means living with the fact that people expect you to want you to be happy. Sometimes, that actually makes it even worse. Acceptance of people makes it better. When people know you are sad and look you in the eye and tell you it’s OK to be sad makes it so much more meaningful than people telling you it could be worse, you should be happy. In that moment, nothing really matters, the knowledge of others having it worse is already there, so we don’t need to hear about it. We just need your acceptance. Along with that, we need to know you will be there to catch us when we fall again.

Right now, you are probably wondering what I mean by again. That one thing that everyone wants you to feel, happy, does come along at some point but the worst part about it is that you never know how long it is going to last. Remember when I said there is always a downside to the upside? The upside is your happiness, that point in time where you can kiss the ground happiness, where you have a smile on your face and a pep in your step. That interval of time between your last fall and your next, the time when people ask: how are you, and you smile back at them and say: good, how are you?

Being on the upside is, of course, the best feeling you can possibly have when you deal with depression. Your gloomy days are now behind you and you no longer have to suffer. You don’t question everything that comes your way, and you just live blissfully and peacefully. There is no burden anymore, therefore there is no sadness.

That happiness is exactly how I have been feeling for the past month, at least. Then I started to remember the darkness that sat deep inside my brain. The thought of how it can have complete control over me at any point in time, all it has to do is snap its fingers and there I go, back into its threshold. I reminded myself that if I think about it too much I will send myself back into depression without even trying. So, to keep that from happening I tried thinking of other things like the happy events and feelings I have been having lately, and the goals my boyfriend and I had set for the future. I did this in hopes to keep the darkness at bay.

Then I woke up, and it was all gone. The happiness, the joy, the overwhelming feeling of love, it was all gone. I laid there, wanting to stay hidden from the world, angry at how all those feelings could just vanish and become distant memories. It makes me hate myself, who I am, and what this does to my life. The ambition is gone again, the hope for a bright future seems to be years away, again. Now I just feel like an empty shell all over. Everything is heavy, every thought is sad, I look at myself and wonder who I am. I have to fight this beast all over again and I just don’t have the energy. But that’s what it does, it strips you of your energy, of your emotion and ambition, it strips you of who you are and locks you away until it decides to let you live again.

So, why don’t people who suffer want to be happy? Because of this, this dreadful feeling of guilt. Like you did it to yourself and now everyone around you is going to hate you. That fun and excited person is gone for awhile because her time was up. The tears, sadness, anger, and self destruction will come back, all because somewhere in her brain it decided she has had too much fun. This is the downside to the upside of depression, as we have heard throughout our lifetime, what goes up, must come down.