When I find myself lying in bed beneath the invisible weight of depression, I often call myself lazy. It is unjust, especially because the misdiagnosis leads to the wrong set of antidotes. Depression is not sloth. You don’t tell someone with a broken leg to go for a long run in order to feel better. You give her a cast and crutches. You let him sit down. There is a difference between not wanting to and not being able to (even if the reasons are hard to articulate or prove).
For me, depression is a state of being rather than one sensation or feeling. It becomes my environment, my world. It consumes me and every ounce of energy I muster. Like a dark forest, it utterly surrounds me—and the way out is hard and long and confounding.
My depression is like water. It is at once tiny and great. Small, because there are few things it can’t penetrate. Massive, because its end always seems an infinite distance away. I constantly feel that I’m in the middle of it—making no progress towards its end. And then one day, and very unceremoniously, I awake to find I’ve left it behind (or it’s left me). No matter how dark and vast it was, it always ends eventually. Perhaps God lifts me out of it like an emotional search and rescue team because I never recognize the approach of the end, just that it’s behind me.
When I’m depressed, I feel as though an unreachable part of myself is broken. But the cause of my discomfort won’t show up on an MRI or x-ray. The pain is at once real and intangible—oppressive and insubstantial. I perceive it, but I can’t point to where it hurts—because there is no one place that aches. The pain is nowhere and omnipresent.
Depression is an exasperating enigma. It feels like a puzzle everyone else has been able to solve. It is frustrating because it’s like being restrained by something that isn’t there at all. It feels like starving at a buffet or remaining in a jail cell after being declared innocent. It is sitting in a dark, deep hole with a ladder, but you can’t see—let alone reach—it.
Depression feels like a lot of things, but there is at least one thing it is not.
Depression is not a failure, just as winter is not a mistake among the seasons. Denying depression is like expecting summer to supply snow or autumn to bear blossoms. And just as the world has rain, wind, cold, and sun, your mental health exists on a vast spectrum. Certainly some states are easier to experience while others are more challenging to endure, but all of them have rights to your time and attention.
