Earlier this month, comedian Sarah Silverman gave an interview to Glamour magazine about her lifelong battle with depression. Thumbing through Facebook articles to kill time, I didn’t give the headline much thought until I clicked through and saw this poignant, painful quote describing the mental illness:
“’It feels like I'm desperately homesick, but I'm home.'"
Seeing these words hit me right in the gut – never have I read a quote that so swiftly and solidly describes the drowning sensation that depression creates. After the initial punch wore off, a wave of calm and pity came over me when I realized that a famous person who built her career on making others find joy felt that same pit in her stomach.
Depression in my family health history has left me no stranger to the dark cloud that hangs thick. In fact, a dark cloud is the best way to describe it: have you ever been outside on a beautiful, calm day, when suddenly the bright sunshine and blue sky are disrupted by the tendrils of a black cloud rolling in? That is precisely what depression feels like. Some days, it’s marked by your bones feeling like cement, keeping you from leaving bed–others, it’s your laughter with your friends ringing hollow in your ears as you can’t quite shake the burden from your shoulders in what is supposed to be the creation of a perfect memory. As poetic as these words may appear, depression is a simple, severely common and strangely silent affliction.
I often feel doubt in the validity of this battle. For the most part, at least to everyone around me, I’m dressed decently, with my hair curled and makeup done. I crack jokes and tell stories, I start conversations with strangers– does all of this lessen the reality of what I’m feeling? The answer to this is something I feel like I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to figure out, an explanation I owe nobody but myself. I tell myself it’s the changing of the seasons, it’s midterms, it’s thankless hours at work– but the truth is, even in my highest moments, the cloud looms.
It’s not that depression is a terribly remarkable struggle, it’s that it is a very lonely one. It is disheartening to hear how horribly common it is among people that I look up to and even more so in people my age. I am not brave, nor am I different. On the contrary, it is fairly predictable that a culmination of heredity and a stressful pace of school and work at this point in my life has kept me locked in this ebb and flow between ecstasy and desperation.
I write this in a rough spot, vulnerable, simply seeking solidarity. I also write in sincere hopefulness that I can give anyone reading reassurance that someone out there, far beyond pixels on the internet, is familiar with feeling homesick, too.
