
When I was sad, this all felt important. When you are depressed, people who have never been depressed are positively horny to offer advice and assessments of your situation. They say, Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and Fake it ‘til you make it and It can’t be that bad. America contends with depression out of both sides of its mouth, treating it with medication like a valid clinical pathology, but blaming its sufferers for shortcomings of character and will. The reality is, depression weaves around and between these two categorizations in an unpredictable way — something that seems irrational and even impossible to someone who has never experienced it. There is plenty of space in the cultural conversation for stories about what it was like to have be…