A few months ago I publicly expressed on social media how depressed I was feeling.
It was a frightening thing to do and I cringed with so many fears about the responses it would get. I feared impatience, dismissal, accusations of attention seeking or ‘being silly’, worrying people, and rejection, but I knew that part of my working through it meant exposing the darkness I was in by biting the bullet and shining a light on it; a demon despises seeing itself in the mirror and in the eyes of others under the bright lights.
I was touched and pleasantly surprised by the positive, supportive responses and the outpouring of love.
Fast forward into a brand new year and I now find myself in a better place. That doesn’t mean life is perfect, or that I don’t ever feel sad, but it means I’m approaching things differently in my mind, and I can distinguish between sad and depressed.
I’ve learned a lot about this thing labelled depression. Shockingly I’ve known it intimately since I was 12 years old. I had my first suicidal thoughts at 13…yes, 13. A pubescent young girl fresh out of childhood, feeling the trauma of going from popular girl with lots of new, firm friends to a sudden, unpopular, lonely, bullied alien in a totally different country. I won’t bore you with all the details but suffice to say that it unfortunately wasn’t my last ’bout’ of depression. Fortunately, however, in the handful of times that this has happened it has never been death that I craved, but instead a desire to be deeply seen and saved, so naturally I’ve never had the guts to attempt anything, and thankfully my higher self has always taken me to a point of breakdown where it could only go back up from there.
Over the following 25 years, I’ve experienced a lot of ups and downs with my mental health with various episodes of depression and ‘I just want it all to end’ moments and lots of extras thrown in, like anxiety, panic attacks and other weird fears and behaviours.
We’ve all been there right? It’s almost impossible not to have certain issues in this world, but one thing I’ve noticed is that there are those who are sensitive and reactive to everything they’re feeling, and those who force themselves to be ‘functional’ by pushing it as far down as they can.
My purpose here is to expose depression even more in order to give some food for thought to both those types of people. To expose depression and its sly and manipulative ways so that anyone with any experience of it can recognise the tricks and not take its bullshit.
Depression loves to be a taboo, so we should definitely expose it, but it’s worth noting that often when you try to expose it, it initally tries to use the exposure by turning you into a ‘look at poor little me’ victim. See…manipulative. It’s OK, you know now, and it knows that you know, so we’re on the right track.
I refer to it as IT, because it’s not US. The less personal it sounds the less attached to it we will be. We do have control over how we deal with it that’s for sure, contrary to what many believe when they are in its clutches, but it’s important to know that the behaviours we express at that point do not define who we are as people.
Depression is, in the first instance, a useful warning; an alert to some form of imbalance, clash, or build up within us that needs tending to or releasing. Problems seem to arise when we start overly engaging with it. A bit like that sales phone call that we wish we hadn’t answered and get pulled into by a charismatic voice on the other end, but we feel too embarrassed to immediately hang up, then the next thing we know we’ve been billed for answering the call. Once we engage in the first signs of depression without any safety precautions or fail-safe in place, it’s almost like a rip-tide, we get sucked in and pulled under until we start drowning.
It’s important to get to know depression intimately so that we can always be a step ahead even if it feels like a ‘sudden’ onset. We can do this by learning what it likes, dislikes, what it wants, doesn’t want, and so on.
It definitely likes to lead us to believe that we need to fight, because if we are fighting it then we are engaged and giving it full, passionate, undivided attention, which means we enter into a perpetual struggle, which further feeds the cycle that fuels it.
It tells us we can’t be happy and will always be depressed unless all the chess pieces are in place. The house, the job, the relationship, the finances, the body, the everything. All of the pieces or else. We forget that it’s not things that make happiness, others out there are not depressed and live with less, and we forget to see the great things we already have. Happiness is a state dependent on our perceptions, and that is the only condition. In fact we forget so badly, that huge chunks of life pass us by, and sometimes the people and things that we become blind to just stop hanging around us.
We forget these things because depression ensures that we have our heads stuck so far up our own arses that we can’t really see what’s around us clearly, we can’t see things as they are anymore in the dense brain fog it keeps us suffocated in. We end up unintentionally becoming self-absorbed to the point that we can no longer identify when those around us might not be OK either. We sadly start using depression as a license to be either rude, dismissive, and appallingly callous, or clingy and paranoid towards everyone, or all of them at once, especially those we care about the most.
If we get that far into it, we eventually reach a point where we begin to experience a type of Stockholm Syndrome; defending our mind captor. We rarely realise we are doing this because by that point we are brainwashed and triggered by everything around us. Whether it is someone offering advice or someone telling us there is a way out of it, it doesn’t matter. We grab hold of it, completely incensed by anyone that would dare to say a word (not even a bad word) about our depression and defend it vehemently to the point of lost friendships and almost complete isolation, expecting it to be with us forever because we no longer know what the alternative looks like and the unknown scares us even more.
You’d think we could put all that strength and power we use defending it, into breaking it.
The other end of the scale of this expectation of having it forever, is taking pills that seem to ‘improve’ it, and then grabbing hold of those instead of the depression until we believe we will need to take them for life; now both the depression and the depressed are in a long, deep, foggy sleep, like they’re sprawled out together in an opium den of the mind, where things feel just sort of comfortable and just about OK, as long as nothing too up or down rocks the boat, and as long as they never have to face the sharp, raw pain of waking it up and dealing with it head on.
After the defending of the depression stages there is sometimes a final point where we might possibly snap and break down or awaken, or snap and throw ourselves off a bridge. The snap point can sometimes take many years, or just a few weeks, it depends on our individual situations.
Left to complete that cycle, it is a darkness that spreads and violates our minds, weakening us until we give all of our power to it, becoming slaves and addicts to everything outside of ourselves.
It’s not all tragic, the first bit of good news is that this means we know how it likes to behave, and we can see it in action.
Over time and from a clearer fog-less mind, I can see the difference now between the responses of depression and non-depression.
A non depressed person is either sad, grieving, frustrated, helpless etc. at any given time due to any difficult given circumstance that has come up. A depressed person regardless of what each individual scenario is, can no longer distinguish individual emotional responses…everything is just contributing to another layer of deep, dark shit burying them alive further and further.
Since the new year I’ve had at least two difficult or upsetting things crop up and I’ve cursed, I’ve stressed, and at one point I’ve had a good cry, but without the depression, that was all it was, releases and reactions that I soon talked myself through. I’ve also had some pretty good days too. Had I been depressed, I probably wouldn’t have even stopped to think of the good, and I would have taken those difficult things and added them to my depression dramas; the releasing cry would have become a ‘my life is over’ sobbing session and the stressing would have paralysed me or sent me into a hyperventilating mess, possibly ending with staying in bed for the weekend or not turning up at work.
The other good news is, I’ve learned what can weaken and dissolve it.
I’m not saying I’ll never feel depressed again, but I can’t say that I will, either. I feel like I know it so well now that if I ever feel it coming, I will go straight for the love and light fail-safe. Being this public and open about it now is part of that, I now know who the supportive people are and I recommend that anyone relating to any of this try it for themselves too.
It scrambles in the face of being offered love and positive attention, like a terrified headless chicken. It weakens when we stare at its selfishness and when we sit in front of it, accepting of its presence. It hates itself you see, so when we do that, it feels vulnerable and exposed and it sits and squirms, begging us to fight with it.
When we then tell it firmly yet gently that NO, we are NOT going to fight, but instead we are willing to give it a safe container where we can sit and just be with it for a few days while we let it cry, ruminate, contemplate, watch crap, eat crap or whatever else it needs, so that we can get to know it a little better, but then after that we’re going to do maybe just one little thing to improve it, then two little things, then another and so on and so forth as the days go by, it gets even more worked up if you get others in on it too, whether professional or not…it will resist like its life depends on it, because depression’s life as it knows it DOES depend on it; it will literally die if it goes along with your suggestions. It wants us to be an eternal victim, and it hates that we want to work with it, not fight it. It hates that we want to shine bright lights on it, not drown in its dark pit, and it despises that we keep telling it kind words, instead of practically ripping our hair out and cursing the day we were born.
Most of all, it hates that we’ve figured out the truth; that the pieces don’t all have to be in place, that we can carry on despite not having everything we want right now, or despite the bad things that sometimes crop up. Persevere in the face of its resistance, if it wants a fight let it sulk and kick itself into exhaustion as you stand firm, because life will still go on, and the world will still continue to turn without it.
Demons and fallen angels- Lightstock
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