Opening Up About Living With Depression: To share, or not to share? That is the question.

Foreword:
I still feel a deep sense of uncertainty about my decision to share my personal struggles with depression publicly. It’s not easy, but I think it’s a shame that we have such a stigma culturally against emotional honesty.
So I choose to share my pain. I’m not looking for sympathy, I’m putting this out there for those who feel similarly alone — so they can know that they are NOT alone, and that it IS worth it to express their feelings. Not doing so only makes it worse.
Please only continue if you really want some insight into what are, honestly, some rather unpleasant thoughts. It’s not pretty, and I am fighting my own reluctance to share it.
[TW: Suicide, depression]
I hate talking about my emotional struggles. It makes me feel weak, and exposed, and vulnerable. It makes me worry that I’ll be judged. It often results in exactly that, so the fear is somewhat justified.
Mental health professionals tell me that keeping my pain all bottled up will make it fester and grow, building up until it destroys my ability to feel joy. They are right. I know that. It is how I’ve spent my whole life, and I’ve seen and experienced exactly what they predicted.
Yet well-meaning friends can only offer advice like “Keep your mind on happier things, keep yourself busy, don’t focus on the negative, keep smiling, fake it till you make it” and so on. I get it. And I try. After a while, the “happy mask” becomes permanently fixed to my face, the tears stop falling, and while I present as a highly-functioning, capable, more-or-less healthy individual, the decay of my emotional well-being is in advanced, terminal cancer state. It metastasizes across all the various areas of my life, compounding the shame of hiding my pain, growing into a tremendous pressure with no release. A dam of unexpressed grief builds up, and instead of letting it out… I keep smiling. I fake it. I keep myself busy. And I slowly die inside.
Well-meaning friends often have not experienced serious trauma. They don’t quite understand what it’s like to live through decades of chronic depression that doesn’t go away with medication. They think I’ll get over it. That I’ll get better in a while. They don’t really get it when I say ”I’m okay, considering the circumstances” but it’s code for “I don’t want to bring you down, I know you can’t understand or help, and I love you more than I love myself, there’s no hope for me, I’m a miserable shell of a human being, but I don’t want to lose your respect and friendship, so I choose to bury my pain with white lies and masking my hurt”. They don’t know what it’s like to wake up honestly disappointed that I didn’t die in my sleep, because life is unrelenting, and I’ve grown so tired of carrying this burden. They can’t really wrap their head around suicide, that it’s not a desire to die, but a wish for the pain to go away coupled with an experience of life that holds more pain than I feel capable of sustaining.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I don’t WANT anyone to understand this feeling. It’s awful. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, not even my worst enemies. Well, if I had any. Hate is exhausting. I know, because I hate one person more than anyone in the world. That loathsome, awful piece of shit who I wish would JUST. FUCKING. DIE.
No, not my ex.
Not, not one of my childhood abusers.
Me, of course.
Who else could I hate? It’s too much effort, physically, mentally, and emotionally to sustain that level of energy to hold HATE in my heart for anyone else, when I’m already burned out fighting with everything in my power to shut off my own perpetual assault of illogical negative thoughts.
I hate that I am so fucking weak that I can’t fight this feeling. I hate my own inability to recover from depression. I hate my body for giving in to uncontrollable trembling, heart-pounding, unreasonable panic attacks over trivial bullshit. I hate my brain for running a 24/7 radio station reminding me that I’m a worthless piece of shit, especially because I *KNOW* that’s not true; but the chorus rings on forever, in endless variations. Singing it cheerfully to the tunes of my favorite songs, whispering it in the voices of my best friends, telling me it’s my own sacred truth.
I don’t want to share that.
I want to love myself, to be loved.
I want to be understood, sure. I want someone to wrap their arms around me and tell me I’m NOT an awful monster, that I’m worthy of love, that my pain is undeserved. I want to be loved. But…
When is it ever appropriate, in our culture of critical social judgement, ghosting, and emotional distance to share that kind of brutal honesty? The answer of course is that there ISN’T a space for it. Well, you can pay a trained professional to listen to you, if you can afford that. They will listen as long as you want — well, no, actually, you have to wait three months for an appointment, and then you get 45 to 53 minutes, so you’d better be able to blurt it all out quickly. Save it up for that special time!
But don’t TELL anyone you’re sick. Shame on you for not being okay!! Fix yourself! Go to the gym! Just fucking fake it until you make it, put on a smile, bury yourself in meaningless activities to distract from the problems, lie to your friends to keep them because you can’t risk being your own, hurting SELF! Bury that poison so deep inside you it will never escape your soul, and can only hurt YOU. But NEVER, EVER open up about your suffering!!!! That’s just … *gasp* …socially unacceptable! You’d be better off wearing white socks after Labor Day, you uncouth barbarian!
I don’t know how to explain the effort I’ve put in, that I continue to put in day after day, to keep money coming in, so I can throw it at a paid listening ear. To KEEP that functioning persona running.
Do you know where the word “person” comes from? It’s fascinating:
person (n.):
early 13c., from Old French /persone/ “human being, anyone, person” (12c., Modern French /personne/) and directly from Latin /persona/ “human being, person, personage; a part in a drama, assumed character,” originally “a mask, a false face,” such as those of wood or clay worn by the actors in later Roman theater. OED offers the general 19c. explanation of /persona/ as “related to” Latin /personare/ “to sound through” (i.e. the mask as something spoken through and perhaps amplifying the voice), “but the long o makes a difficulty ….” Klein and Barnhart say it is possibly borrowed from Etruscan /phersu/ “mask.” Klein goes on to say this is ultimately of Greek origin and compares /Persephone/.
I feel like being a functioning person is an act I put on, a mask through which a hollow voice sounds out the lines people want to hear:
“I’m doing okay, really. Thanks.”
I recite the lines from the stage of my own life, because I just don’t know how to say otherwise. There’s no script for this struggle. How do you talk about life being suffering, without sounding like a whiny little bitch? Or a sage Buddhist? Or Hamlet?
SparkNotes modernizes the famous “To be or not to be?” quote from Hamlet very plainly, as this:
“The question is: is it better to be alive or dead?
Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles by simply putting an end to them once and for all?
Dying, sleeping — that’s all dying is — a sleep that ends all the heartache and shocks that life on earth gives us — that’s an achievement to wish for.
To die, to sleep — to sleep, maybe to dream.
Ah, but there’s the catch:
in death’s sleep, who knows what kind of dreams might come, after we’ve put the noise and commotion of life behind us.
That’s certainly something to worry about.
That’s the consideration that makes us stretch out our sufferings so long.”
I don’t *WANT* to die.
But I also don’t *WANT* to keep living in an unbearable situation of immense pain that has no straightforward answers, and that no one else can really understand, and that is ultimately my own problem to solve.
And I don’t want to give up hope, either.
So, I keep pushing that burden up the hill, like Sisyphus from Greek mythology — endlessly forced by the vengeful, angry gods to an eternal punishment in Tartarus (“Hell,” so to speak, though in my case a living hell) rolling a boulder that will never make it to the top of the hill he’s stuck on. Or it makes it, but rolls back down, in a neverending, daily struggle. And, as that asshole philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre so blithely put it, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy”. I must imagine there’s a way to break out of this curse, and somehow find happiness. To spit in the face of the gods and enjoy my punishment.
It takes a lot of imagination. It’s tiring. But I’m trying. I really am. And, all things considered… I guess I’m doing okay.
In the meanwhile, I just needed to get this off my chest.
Thanks for reading. Thanks for listening.
