What is Depression?

Depression is like an invisible devil on your shoulder.  He looks shriveled and angry, like an anorexic crackhead with the face of Charles Boyer.



He tells you things that aren't true, that normal people would never listen to much less believe, but for some reason his words are able to reach you and cut you worse than a dull serrated knife.

He tells you that everyone you love would be better off without you, don't get attached because they will eventually leave; that you don't deserve any happiness, you're fat, ugly, stupid, etc.

He zaps your energy so you don't have the motivation to do mundane things, like shower or put away the laundry.

You don't talk about him much, because one of two things will happen...they'll tell you to "snap out of it", or they'll sit there and listen, but you don't feel like they actually get what you're saying.  Maybe they do, maybe they don't.  Either way, you don't see their support for what it is because he hisses in your ear to stop bothering them with your problems, they don't really want to hear it and they can't help anyway.  Eventually it just hurts to exist.

You find ways to ignore him temporarily, you find a new love, a new hobby, and it helps for a little while.  The relief feels so good that your new fascination becomes an obsession.  But eventually he breaks through that wall you've built, and tells you that your lover will leave someday, that your poems are no good, that there is no point in fixing up your car, it'll break down some other way.  Might as well accept that you can't keep anything good in your life.

Meanwhile, to an outsider's perspective, it is difficult to tell what is going on. You might actually have a good life, lots of friends who care about you, a family who loves you.  None of it matters as long as he is on your shoulder, taunting you.

As time goes by, either you figure out a way to block him out or shut him up via therapy, medication, vice...or you let the pain he inflicts take over.  Your inner strength comes and goes with the tide, at the flick of a switch.  It is a war that can be won, only victory is harder for some to reach than others, and you watch as other soldiers drop like flies around you.  If they couldn't make it, how can there be hope for you?

Despite my own worst moments, I've held onto the belief that this life is worth living, that this parasite on my shoulder will not win.  If I can keep fighting long enough for something else to kill me instead, then the deaths of my fellow soldiers (like Anthony Bourdain and Chris Cornell, to name just two) will not have been in vain.

All I can do is take it one day at a time.

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