Depression isn’t a reward to claim for suffering the most

A couple of years ago I hit rock bottom. My depression that I have been dealing with since elementary school ate me up and I couldn’t find the way to crawl out of the beast’s stomach. Every single night I fell asleep crying and woke up lacking motivation. The internal emptiness became a physical pain that I felt in every cell of my body.

I needed to vent thus decided to create a blog on Tumblr. My posts reflected my true feelings about the pointlessness of living. I enjoyed the unfiltered honesty that I couldn’t express offline however the most impactful experience was getting to see many people resonate with my thoughts. It assured me that I’m not alone trying to cope with the mess that is depression.

Every person had a different story, I’ve read blogs by veteran Marines, bullied teenagers, adults who were dealing with the effects of abuse. While my own story touches on multiple topics from hereditary tendency to mental illness to bullying, there have been occasions when the thought hit me that whatever I have gone through isn’t a reason for me to be depressed.

This idea wasn’t born in a vacuum, it specifically rose from the implication I have been exposed to over the years, the implication that a hierarchy exists between stories. That some people deserve to be depressed while others should just stop being depressed.

While some of the notion clearly stems from people who aren’t suffering from depression, it’s not uncommon for depressed people to assert their position within the community by declaring the stories of others’ less legitimate in terms of being the cause of depression. This toxic policing of who is and who isn’t “worthy” of depression is extremely harmful to the most vulnerable of people who might just start to understand what’s going on with them. More often than not the negative attitude toward other depressed people is the child of petty arguments and disagreements that go out of hand online. The Internet and its ability to turn simply, average people into community leaders definitely helps spread the misconception that claiming depression is a form of reward for suffering.

Unfortunately this problem also exists beyond the circles of depression. Many groups that relate to various conditions and “states of existence” — meaning sexuality, gender identity, other — can report about people who practically declare themselves the sole judges of whose words, suffering, feelings, etc are legitimized. The truth is that a self-important personality doesn’t turn into a caring one due any illness, condition or self-finding hence you will find ignorant a**holes even among people who supposed to know better. It’s very typical that a few individuals become blinded due their own self-centeredness and become the bigots and ignorants they fight themselves…

Depression isn’t easy to deal with even without the drama that some people can cause. It’s crucial to remember that how you got to this point doesn’t define how legitimate your feelings are; they are legitimate because you feel them. There’s no “right” amount of trauma or “right way” to be traumatized to be considered depressed. The only thing that truly matters is your well-being and that you understand how your own depression operates so you’re able to handle it.