I was diagnosed with moderate to severe depression and generalized anxiety disorder after I called the Suicide Hotline and spent a long night on the couch while my mother watched me warily. That was a year ago, before I began to connected my feelings to those of a clinically depressed person. I was told that it was very normal – adolescence is a transitional period in which many people feel down or depressed – but my parents had me under constant surveillance after that night. They took me for a psych evaluation that week. I was miserable. The doctor prescribed Zoloft, which made me feel light-headed. I continued to feel miserable. I started going to therapy, still feeling tired and emotionally drained. During those weeks, I tried to write about how depression was affecting me – how I felt. But that was the problem: I didn’t feel.
Depression in the movies paints a picture of a wide-eyed, twenty-something woman who realizes that her life is far too hard for her to keep going. She falls into elegant despair and eventually slits her wrists in a bathtub or swallows a bottle of sleeping pills. This depiction of depression disgusts me, but I understand why it exists.
Real-life depression is boring to watch. It’s skipping school because you think that maybe, just maybe, if you stay in bed you won’t feel as bad. It’s performing daily tasks slowly, as if you are balancing your psyche on top of your head and if you move too fast or too suddenly, it will shatter. Real-life depression is a messy bedroom, not because you are a slob, but because the thought of taking those few steps to hang up a shirt or pick up a plate is mentally incapacitating.
Real-life depression is a lot of Internet surfing, because the things you used to love don’t make you happy anymore. It isn’t sadness – it’s lack of happiness. It’s restlessness. It’s anger toward the people you care about because the simplest tasks throw you over the edge. Those who see you in this state are likely to tell you that you should see a doctor or, better yet, that you just need to be positive. “It’s all up from here!” But you look ahead in your life and everything is tainted gray. Even the good things are soiled and the thought of moving forward makes you nauseous. You keep spiraling down, hateful and withdrawn until you realize, abruptly, that you no longer want to live.
Suddenly, all of the weight that has been sitting on your fragile mind disappears and is replaced with … absolutely nothing. That’s right, folks. You spend weeks hating yourself and everyone else, wondering why all of your other feelings are so diluted, and then suddenly – poof – everything is gone.
In the moment, the thought is liberating. You don’t care about anything, so nothing hurts you anymore. You are invincible. You want to run down the streets with your arms spread because for the first time that you can recall, you are free from the crushing boredom and restlessness that has been burrowing into your skull.
It isn’t happiness. It’s absolute mania. Because you no longer want to live, you no longer care about what you do or what happens to you. But this mania will dissipate, and then you are left with absolutely nothing. So you try to bring your regular feelings back. Any feeling will do. You experiment with destructive behaviors. You just want to feel something. Anything. But your feelings, you realize, are dead, so why not be dead too?
This is the final stage. It can go in one of three directions: (1) You sadly manage to end your life. (2) You try to commit suicide, but instead end up in an emergency room or an ambulance where people save you. (3) You grab whatever tool you plan on using to do the deed, stare at it for a long time, and decide to get help. Thankfully my life went in the direction of number three, and if you reach that stage, I urge you to go with that option too.
You will start to get better. It might take medicine or therapy or institutionalization, but you will get better. Your feelings will begin to come back. They will resurface slowly and often not in the right order, but eventually they will return. There are still some nights when I don’t really want to be alive. I go through spans of several weeks where I start to feel myself slipping back into a depressed or emotionless state, but it passes, no matter how miserable I get. It’s like any illness. The remission process is long and tedious, but it is remission nonetheless.
Then, just as suddenly as you realized that you wanted to die, you will realize that you want to live. At this point, the things you loved will start making you happy again.
Life has ups and downs, but depression is not just a low point on the graph. It’s a flatline. Some people will not conquer that stage, just as some do not recover from other illnesses. If you do manage to make it back up, you will emerge over the crest, haggard and cynical from the dust in your eyes and the dirt in your lungs. But this too will pass, and you will look over the mountains and the valleys ahead of you, and you will be glad to have survived to see them.