I am posting this because I have had a very disturbing conversation with someone earlier today about depression. I felt compelled to put her in her place after hearing several ignorant remarks from her. To put it plain and simple, she mentioned that a mutual friend of ours is going through depression. Her attitude was that our friend should just toughen up, quit being a pussy and get on with his life. She doesn't seem to understand that depression is a sickness and not something that one can simply snap out of with just a blink of an eye. So here's my take on it. I speak from experience, from having to go through bouts of depression myself. I hope people like her would learn from this and I hope that my dearest friend would eventually find his way back here and read this post...
Our moods colour our world and shape our reality. Depression is the feeling of being "blue".
Like guilt, depression occurs when anger is trapped and turned inward. One of my favourite expressions, "Depression is Anger without the enthusiasm." When you think about it, that saying holds some truth to it. Anger becomes hatred, and begins to rob life of its meaning. It takes energy to make one's world a liveable place, and the depressed person often has little energy to invest. Obviously when a depressed person and a happy person look at the same autumn landscape they are reacting to the same external world. Assuming that their senses are intact, the sensory impressions they receive are largely the same. Yet...there is a great difference in the world each finally experiences. Talk about the voice of experience, eh?
The happy person looks at the landscape and sees in it a relfection of his good feelings. The depressed person finds only additional reasons for being depressed as he calls to mind people now absent, his inner emptiness, his worthlessness, and worst of all, the contratst between his inner sadness and the brilliant world around him.
I guess, having said that, our moods indeed colour our world and shape our reality, no?
In depression, energy seems turned against the self. Rather than allow feeling to flow naturally, the depressed regards each angry feeling as proof of his worthlessness and recoils from expressing any anger. Even so, he often appears angry as his overwhelmed defenses let bits of anger leak out here and there.
So what's the difference between sad and depressed? Well, although depressed people often feel sad, deppression differs from sadness. Sadness is the feeling of depletion that follows a hurt or a loss. When people feel sad and ask themselves, "What have I lost?" or "How have I been hurt?" they can usually come up with an answer that makes sense. They can express their anger over their hurt and pain from their loss. Their anger hasn't been buried, and if the hurt is set straight, their sadness usually disappears.
If stated that way, it sounds so easy, doesn't it? It makes you just want to say, "so why don't the depressed just get the hell over whatever it is and move on?" But perhaps, if you put yourself in their shoes, try to see things from a different perspective, you'll realize that it's really not that simple at all.
When people are sad for a long time, without understanding what their sadness means, they often lose touch with the event that caused the sadness. Depression is the result. Their sadness just stays there, fed by a deep reservoir of anger, helplessness, resentment and hatred. They feel worthless. Depressed people are always struggling to hold back their anger--or any other emotion for that matter, and this very act of holding back depletes them further and can make them feel sick. Even though sadness and depression may sometimes feel the same at a given moment, they are not. The sadness of everyday life dissipates. The sadness in depression, on the other hand, is trapped. Left alone, it grows. Ordinary sadness passes with changes in fortune. Depression does not. Sadness is a passing phase in the natural flow of feelings. Depression is a disruption of the flow of feelings.
Everyone has had feelings of sadness, and most of us have felt depressed at one time or another in our lives. To be depressed is to feel lifeless, inhibited, and drained. Bodily functions are slowed down. Depressed people frequently have sleep disturbances. They characteristically wake early in the morning and can't go back to sleep again. They also find falling asleep difficult and are restless and easily awakened. What sleep they do get is not refreshing. Disturbing dreams in which trapped feelings seek expression often interrupt their sleep.
The depressed person appears harried, worried, desperate to contain his anger and self-hate. To tolerate this state for long is exhausting. Defenses wear down and in the worst cases energy stops flowing outward at all. When people feel helpless, to contain their rage and believe that things won't improve, they may turn their anger against themselves in one final attempt to end their pain-- either as a cry for help or as a real attempt to end their life. Again, speaking with the voice of experience here.
But you know? Depression isn't always without its positive side. Even though depression is painful to endure, it also can lower defenses that have been too rigid or too obscuring and permit a person a cleaner, less distorted view of himself. During a depression people frequently begin to understand themselves for the first time and may be put in touch with other self-revealing feelings. In depression a person has a sense of having lost something very important that he was previously unaware of. He may feel that he has lost so much already that he has nothing more to lose by being honest with himself and re-examining what he thinks is important in his life.
A depression, if accompanied by this kind of new awareness, may be the turning point for someone who previously has been poorly organized and not able to find direction. The collapse of the defenses can help a person to reshape his life, to find the courage to challenge what he thought was so important before--"If what I had was supposed to be so important to me, why wasn't I happy?" He may realize there is still time to change. Many people finally stop taking life for granted after overcoming a depression.
Becoming depressed is hardly recommended as the ideal way for finding out what you're really like, but to ignore the realities about yourself that are revealed when your defenses are down is to miss a valuable opportunity to grow. Worse, the old anger over loss stays trapped, unsolved, and all your suffering has been for nothing. There is after all, no inherent virtue in pain. It needs to be used.
Unsolved depressive feelings can begin to interfere with a person's ability to work or live. Where the pain is too great, insight is often slight. Help is needed. There is no shame in seeking help if one is indeed going through depression. Nor should one be mocked and ridiculed because he or she is depressed.
In depression, as mentioned, going to the depths of your feelings and seeing your inner world as it is may allow you to make decisions you were totally incapable of making before. People recovering from depression often are able to say, "I've been punished enough by my own feelings, now it's time for me to do something for myself. I know what's making me miserable and I know I can't go on living my life the way I have been. That would make me a phony, a fake, I don't want to spend the rest of my life pretending I shouldn't be happy fulfilling someone else's wishes for me. I should be fulfilling my own dreams not theirs. I don't want to spend the rest of my life trying to correct the uncorrectable mistakes of my past. I want to live the life that's mine."
Sound familiar? Yeah I'm sure that I've posted something to that effect several times here in this journal of mine. The thing is, people think thoughts like this all the time but often feel too guilty to take a positive step in their own best interests. Depression can let us see that we're responsible for our own lives and must take charge of fulfilling ourselves. No one is going to do it for us. And as my grammie used to say...If we don't take care of ourselves first we're useless to ourselves and to others.
It makes you wonder why there's so many angst filled journal entries out there from adolescents. This girl commented that depression is sadly a common 'theme' among teens. Or an excuse for someone to be prescribed certain drugs.
I think adolescents often feel depressed, because their views of themselves are constantly changing and they continually suffer lapses in self-esteem. But these lapses can also become the rallying point for their growth and for correcting their mistakes--for giving up artificial and childish ways of acting just to be one of the guys, or just one of the girls, at the expense of being themselves.
In a way, a depressiong makes us all adolescents again, with all the potential and opportunity for growing once more. A depression tells us there is something wrong with the way we're dealing with the world, that there is something wrong with the way we're leading our lives. The pain of depression often makes it possible for us to grow again and to give up sacrificing unnecesarily for others.
Not being you best self is painful. To accept the responsibility of your own feelings and to decide to find what is best in you is the best legacy of a depression.
To be your best self means that you become honest with your feelings. That you give up expectations of being perfect and therefore the need to conceal what you feel, because what you feel is YOU.
Being your best self means that the unique mixture of feelings that is you is the best possible way you can be no matter what those feeling happen to be.
It is best to accept a depression as proof that you are real and that you care. Accept that you are basically good even if sometimes you doubt it and, what's more, can offer evidence to back up your opinion. The problem is not that you are bad, but that you feel that you are bad and that this self-prejudice has caused you to become lost in your guilt.
You owe it to yourself to take courage to grow again.
~miyu
