Content warning: frank discussion of depression, overuse of metaphor, spoilers for “The Count of Monte Cristo”

I have been living with depression for a while now – it’s hard to say exactly how long, for reasons I’ll go into, but I could believe anything from three months up to twelve, and honestly, there were probably signs before that. Now, while I haven’t been formally diagnosed with depression, at some point when you fit almost all of the signs (sans the self-harm and suicide ones, and I have no plans to change that), and your mental health professional of choice calls it depression without hesitation, and you were Googling months ago ‘signs of depression’ while simultaneously recognising that Googling it is a pretty good sign… look, you can call it ‘set of conditions incredibly reminiscent of but not formally recognised as depression’, but let’s just say that this thing is a zebra and not a horse that’s made it its lifelong goal to be a barcode.

It’s hard trying to explain depression, because to make the words exist, I have to think them, and depression alters your way of thinking. The best way I can try to explain it is imagine you’re trying to count or solve some sort of maths problem, and there’s someone in the room with you yelling numbers at you. At some point, you’re not sure which numbers are the right ones and which ones have just been screamed at you by someone with clearly nothing better to do, so the whole process just starts to break down. And of course, even if you stop trying to count, that guy’s still there, except he’s winning.

This is what depression does. It’s a little guy screaming negative stuff at you, and if you don’t realise he’s there, you’re just going to think that the negative thoughts are yours and therefore real.

The last few months of being consciously aware I’m depressed have been eye-opening, in a horrifying realisation kind of way – the mental equivalent of realising that the horror movie monster serial killer was inside your house the whole time. Because then the next thought is – which thoughts were “correct”, and which ones were just yelled at you?

Let’s briefly put yourself in my shoes. Your relationships with many of your friends and family have been pretty much universally declining, your love life is struggling, to put it mildly, your hobbies have seemed much less engaging, and to plagiarise Taylor Swift, work might have been okay, but it hasn’t been fine at all. After about the twentieth time breaking into tears and realising seemingly everything has been going wrong but you’re not sure what’s wrong and fixing it hasn’t helped, you start to see a psychologist. The first few sessions are you realising that these cycles of behaviour aren’t normal and that you have actually been repressing emotions for months. At some point during this process you’re having a conversation with probably about the only person in the world you can be genuinely open and honest with, and that includes yourself. Your relationship with this person has been struggling, and at some point you say something to the effect of “I care about you, more than I care about anyone else besides me, and recently I’ve been feeling like I don’t care about me some of the time.” This sentence is an immediate red flag, because while you’re struggling you’re also not stupid, and you immediately Google symptoms of depression, and the answer to the question turns out to be ‘yes’.

This is when I would like to tell you that things got better, but unfortunately recognising a problem is different to solving it. That conversation happened a few months ago, and it’s hard to say if things have gotten worse or I’ve just gotten better at noticing when things are bad. My guess is the latter, but it definitely feels like the former.

I don’t actually know which thoughts are correct, which relationships that have been damaged are my fault or not, and I don’t have the confidence to be able to figure those out or not. Reaching out is hard when one of the first thoughts is “they probably don’t want to help me anyway” or “I have no idea how they would help me” or “maybe I should keep pretending everything is fine and telling people I’m OK is a good way to maintain social interactions that aren’t about me not being OK, which I would really like to not be reminded of”.

I would love to end this on a high note, but really the best I can give you is probably a middle C. I’ve pretty much moved from ‘trying to fix what I have’ to ‘trying to live with that I have’, which feels either realistic or pessimistic and I haven’t figured out which is better. There is no easy fix for depression that I’m aware of, so hoping that this very loud, very persistent guy goes away because he gets bored is probably not the panacea that I’m hoping for. My goals now are to try to get on with life regardless, and try to actively seek happiness rather than passively have it like I used to have (though that’s far harder than it seems – Mr. Screamy does a fantastic job at reducing my willpower to fight him, and makes it far easier to forget that it’s even possible).

Some quotes that have resonated:
“You must fight them! They are a hive of monsters!” or “Yi’icekdozim! Zagim gogdaslav znazlighavev!” – something I thought of translating into my language months ago
The entirety of Preludes by T.S. Eliot
“The soul makes its own horizons; your soul is overcast, and that is why the sky seems stormy to you.” – from “The Count of Monte Cristo”

It’s also probably relevant that the last sentence of that book is something to the effect of “all of human wisdom is contained in those two word – wait and hope”.

If you stumble upon this and you have depression, then I can only offer you these comics from Hyperbole and a Half, a link to a collections of emergency contacts and websites for your specific country, and a reminder that the average length of depression symptoms is not ‘the rest of your life’, despite how much it might feel like that from the inside.

Thanks for reading.

Update: Life After Depression.