Have you ever woken up in a bad mood? We call it waking up on the wrong side of the bed. You’re cranky and irritable. There’s no real reason why you feel that way, you just do. Imagine that sort of feeling, but instead of cranky, you’re sad and unmotivated. What you just imagined is what it feels like every morning for someone who suffers from depression. They wake up in the morning and likely begin their day by staring at the ceiling. They lie in bed a while thinking of all the excuses they could use to stay in bed, not for a while longer, but all day perhaps. It’s not like when you stay out late on a Sunday night and you want to skip your 8 a.m. class on Monday. You could very well get 12 hours of sleep and wake up still feeling like you will fall apart if you leave your bed.
Some people go through spouts of depression, some become depressed seasonally, and some battle with depression for their entire lives. There’s no real trick. Sometimes you’re just going to stay in bed. Sometimes, you will let your depression get the best of you. I’ve spent entire days only moving from my bed to use the bathroom. I’ll look for any excuse in the book to skip the coffee run with my friends. I email all of my professors saying that I’m sick. This is technically true. Only the sickness that professors assume and excuse is physical. The stomach bug is a better reason to miss a class than depression in the eyes of some. And those are the people who have been lucky enough to never wake up to a battle against depression.
When you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, you get up, get dressed and go about your day. You’re angry but nothing is wrong. When you wake up depressed, you fight to force yourself out of bed. On the mornings that you do win the fight and leave your bed, everything you have to do after that is a struggle for energy and motivation. Simple tasks such as brushing your teeth become grueling. You can’t stomach the idea of so much as a bowl of cereal, let alone a real meal. You’re tired, lacking, and not yourself. It becomes apparent to people that, well, you're not yourself today.
So this is when your friends very lovingly ask you what is wrong and you reply “nothing.” You aren’t lying, or being secretive. Maybe something is wrong but you haven’t identified it as a problem yet or maybe you woke up on the depressed side of the bed today. Friends usually get accusatory now, they’re hurt that you feel you can’t trust them. So they ask again and you try to explain that truly nothing is the matter, it’s just not your day. But that’s not good enough, because for someone who has never woken up to depression tying their limbs down to the bed and screaming at them not to move, they don’t understand.
You’ve been attacked, by your own mind. The problem is that there’s no way to explain it without using a wild metaphor and sounding crazy. But really, truly, there is nothing the matter. Your body shut down and you feel a bit numb. You feel nothing. So maybe sometimes, when your friend says, “nothing is wrong”, respect that when they say “nothing” they truly mean “nothing”.
