What you might not understand about Depression

Published in

The Coffeelicious

4 min readJul 28, 2016

Photo Credit — The Ill Fated Wait — CC License

Depression has been my shadow for as long as I can remember. Always there, always present, always waiting to kick me when I am down. I have, for the most part, hidden my depression and the sickening thoughts that accompany it.

A few months ago, I slowly began to talk about it, to share my writing about it. Most days, I share my experiences so that perhaps mine will help someone who is going through the same things, to know that they are not alone in this battle with depression.

I have encountered so many beautiful souls that truly get what I feel, we share a common ground, the pain and debilitation of depression. I have encountered numerous people that don’t know depression, but they are compassionate and they try to understand. I have also encountered, as expected, many people that simply do not understand it and don’t want to.

I am most thankful for the compassionate ones that don’t personally know depression, but they care and they do try to understand it. Most of all, they acknowledge the realness of it and they love us anyway.

Whether in part or in completeness, some people simply don’t have the compassion and they don’t get depression’s truth. To some people, those of us that battle depression on a daily basis are seen as weak, lazy, cowardly and somehow unworthy of a voice. We are told to “Suck it up” and “Get over it” sometimes we are told to “Get off our lazy asses and do something”. Other times, we are told that we are being “too sensitive” or we are “whining”. “Don’t be such a baby, get out of bed and get on with your life.”

Don’t these people think we would if we could? Do they really think that we enjoy feeling like this?

Do they think we really want to be laying in bed day after day, unable to do the simplest of tasks? Do they think it’s fun to look at our daily life and feel disgusted at the fact that we can’t even motivate ourselves enough to take a shower, brush our teeth, or even get out of our pajamas? No, we don’t enjoy that, we hate it.

There have been days that I have fallen so deeply into the darkness of my depression that I couldn’t make myself walk to the kitchen for something to eat. I have stayed in bed for days at a time, laying there, alternating between sleeping and staring at the ceiling in silence. I have had days that I didn’t shower (there have been more than I care to admit). I am by nature, a person that ‘needs’ to be clean. I obsess over cleanliness and freshness, but when depression pulls me into the darkness, I can’t even find the energy to obsess over the cleanliness, because nothing really seems to matter.

For those of us suffering and battling with depression, telling us to “suck it up” or “get over it” only makes us feel worse. You’re not helping anything that way, and we will think twice before confiding in you again when you say such things. We want to get over it, truly we do. We want to wake up each morning with an honest smile (not a fake one), and have a productive day. We want to come home each evening, get into our bed and drift gently off to dreamland, but we can’t.

Depression is real, it is not something that can easily be shaken. It is the self loathing that wakes us at 2 a.m. and the voice that whispers “you are nothing to anyone”, as we lay in bed wishing we could sleep. It is the 10 a.m. bourbon that we need, to lower the volume of our self doubts. It is sitting on the bathroom floor because you feel too sick to move but you knowing that you can’t possibly have anything to vomit because you really haven’t eaten anything in days.

Depression is all of this and much, much more. If you or someone you love is suffering with depression, just know that you are not alone. I offer my compassion and my understanding to you, take my friendship and we can walk through this together.

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