Then you feel guilty for admitting you're depressed (Why aren't you able to shake it off?), and you feel guilty 'pandering' to your depression by 'letting it' alter your plans and lifestyle.
But Depression is a disease. When you have a chronic lifelong condition like Depression, sometimes you need to stop. Rest. Recover.
It isn't easy. It feels like failing and being a disappointment, but you have to take your health seriously. Especially your mental health.
Depression makes you way more vulnerable to all kinds of negative emotions. Just like some illnesses make you more vulnerable to a cold or infection, you have to try to quarantine yourself. You have to try to avoid the bad, the sad, and the painful.
I got to thinking about this as I tried to self quarantine the other night.
Sometimes no matter how hard you try, your depression is determined to ruin your night, you might even see it coming, but you can't quite stave it off.
It reminds me of the epic battle in the first Ghostbusters. They blast at Gozer the demon (evil god?) and she disappears.
But she isn't gone. She's waiting, listening, searching for weakness. (Depression sometimes feels unhappily similar to demonic possession. The bastard disease knows what buttons to push.)
...Then the voice comes. "Choose the form of your destructor."
The human brain is a logical center paired with an emotional center, so many time when the emotional center is out of whack, logic steps in to find or create some sort of logical rationale or reason for all that pain and sadness.
So when the tide of sadness rises up, suddenly your brain starts looking for a REASON, a justification, and if there ISN'T a reason, it'll make shit up. It'll dig through your mind to FIND a reason to be sad.
Choose the form of your destructor. What should we be sad about tonight? Abandoned puppies? Current failings and guilt? Childhood insecurities? Memories of past humiliation or loss? That one thing that someone said that you KNOW they didn't MEAN anything by but it hurt and it's stuck in your brain forever? Or perhaps the spectre that someday you, or your loved ones, will die.
Spin the wheel. Pick a poison.
The problem is when we justify the pain we ultimately magnify it. What started as a burst of random sadness and depression, that might have gone away, we fed it into the blackest parts of our memories and fears, and now it starts a cycle of fault-finding, unhappiness and guilt. We dig up old wounds that still hurt, and that pain makes it worse. It's a spiral you have to force yourself out of. And that's not always easy.
I'd like to end this on some cheerier note about how you have to 'cross the streams' to revert the sadness and climb out of the hole... But I can't trivialize depression with some cliched 'easy answer' ending. There is no easy answer. Sometimes the hole is relentlessly deep... but short lived, a canyon that you eventually climb right out of. Sometimes its shallow but seemingly endless. It's not 'that bad' but it's never 'great' either. You just can't seem to feel joy like other people do. And sometimes it's pit after pit after pit to where you start to think the next one will for sure be full of man-eating tigers and you won't make it out alive.
(I was going to put a death pit of tigers sketch here. I opted for cute tigers instead. You're welcome.)
But you keep going. Just keep going. Build a cycle of good thoughts to help pry you out of a painful spiral. Remember people that love you. Look at cute animals. Read happy books, watch funny shows, remind yourself of seasons and holidays and hobbies that you need to see and do again. Find a reason to keep breathing. Then sleep, and wake up sometime later, and keep breathing some more.
You are stronger than you may ever believe. You are a fighter. Just keep going. It will get better.
