Wow, Anna. I can feel your pain, (Isn’t that what the shrinks always say?) but having experienced very similar life trials, I understand and I DO feel your pain. I’ve been hospitalized so many times I can’t remember them all, and I’ve had three courses of ECT. I’ve been on nearly every anti depressant known to medicine, and yet the most important lesson I’ve learned is that the black thoughts my depressed mind tells me aren’t true.
I wouldn’t be better off dead, nor would the world be better off without me. I am truly a good and decent man, even if I fall short sometimes, but that just makes me more human. I deserve happiness and love, and I deserve to give myself those things that help me have them. When the black cloud rolls in, I know now that there are ways to cope. I don’t fight it, I just accept it, but with the knowledge that what the depression is telling me is NOT the truth, and the truth is that it WILL pass.
It will pass sooner if I can only get up and do the things that are proven to help. Sometimes I fail, and spend all day in front of the TV, but that in itself is cathartic if I allow myself to accept it. Silly, routine things can bring tears to my eyes, but I don’t chastise myself any more, I acknowledge it and wipe my eyes. I take my thyroid meds nearly every day, I take my testosterone supplement nearly every day, I go to the gym nearly three times a week, and then sometimes I don’t.
Medications didn’t help me, in fact they made me worse. Doctors and therapists didn’t help me, because for all of their learning and knowledge, they don’t understand what the black cloud is and feels like. You do, and I do.
That’s why we need to help each other, even if it’s just in a forum like this. I remember what it was like to actually believe that killing myself was an acceptable way to relieve what I now realize was mental anguish and pain. Now, I know better. God Bless you, I pray you keep forging ahead in your understanding of your depression and giving yourself permission to be worth rising above it and living.