Depression and Anxiety

"Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can't wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can't comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can't concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation. Depression is humiliating. If you've never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life. It's not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It's an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. Depression is humiliating. No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You can not imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you've never had it doesn't make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged."

"Depression does not always mean beautiful girls shattering at the wrists. A glorified, heroic battle for your sanity. Or mothers that never got a chance to say good- bye. Sometimes depression means not getting out of bed for three days. Because your feet refuse to believe that they will not shatter upon impact with the floor.

Sometimes depression means that summoning the willpower to go downstairs and do the laundry is the most impressive thing you accomplish that week.

Sometimes depression means lying on the floor staring at the ceiling for hours because you cannot convince your body that it is capable of movement.

Sometimes depression means not being able to write for weeks because the only words you have to offer the world are 'trapped' and 'drowning' and 'I swear to God I'm trying'.

Sometimes depression means that every single bone in your body aches but you have to keep going through the motions because you are not allowed to call in to work depressed.

Sometimes depression means ignoring every phone call for an entire month because yes, they have the right number, but you're not the person they're looking for, not anymore."

"People think depression is sadness. People think depression is crying. People think depression is dressing in black. But people are wrong. Depression is the constant feeling of being numb. Being numb to emotions, being numb to lie. You wake up in the morning just to go back to bed again. Days aren't really days; they are just annoying obstacles that need to be faced. And how do you face them? Through medication, through drinking, through smoking, through drugs, through cutting. When you're depressed, you grasp onto anything that can get you through the day. That's what depression is, not sadness or tears. It's the overwhelming sense of numbness and the desire for anything that can help you make it from one day to the next."

"There is nothing more frustrating, and sometimes frightening, than feeling pain and not being able to describe or explain it to someone. It doesn't matter if it's physical pain or emotional pain. When we can't find the right words to explain our painful experiences to others, we often feel alone and scared. Some of us may feel anger or rage or act out. Eventually, many of us shut down and either live silently with the pain, or in cases where we can't, accept someone else's definition of what we are feeling simply out of the desperate need to find some remedy." -- Brene Brown