Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation. If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.
It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.
“
| — |
EVERYONE NEEDS TO READ THIS.
Depression is not a synonym for being sad or having a bad day/bad week.
It’s not a PHASE. It’s not a CHOICE. It’s not LAZINESS.
(via ladybexodus)
|
“People think depression is about being sad. They think it’s just when you ‘feel down’. It’s not. It’s like a darkness that creeps over you and fills you. It drains all your emotions. It takes everything from you, and leaves you feeling hollow and numb. It’s not sadness, it’s not anger, it’s hopelessness. Imagine waking up and there being no color. Walking outside and feeling no wind. Eating a meal and tasting nothing. Holding someone and feeling completely alone at the same time. When you’re depressed, it’s not a bad mood. It’s a numb, empty, hollowness that seems to never leave. It’s feeling alone in a room full of people. You feel like there’s no hope left.”
Today I will eat nothing. I will drink nothing. I think I will just sleep, I’m so exhausted.
A bit about my past, the bit that led me to here.
I had a pretty rough start at life, and as much as I try to tell myself that I’m not a victim of my past, I know I would be different, maybe even better, if it hadn’t happened.
I was born to a young druggie mother, she was 15, and had no idea what she was doing with a child. At 17 she had my brother. She couldn’t handle us and left us with her mother. My grandmother couldn’t handle us both, so she sent me to my father’s mother so didn’t want or like children at all. I was two years old. From the time I was two til the time I was nine, I was dressed like a boy, beaten, and sexual molested on a daily basis. They would tell me that nobody wanted me or loved me and that I was the cause of everybody’s distress. If it weren’t for me everybody would be fine. I was locked in my room everyday after school. No TV, no bed, just an empty room with a book case. (Which lead to my fondness for reading). When I was nine, one of my teachers finally noticed the bruises, and I was pulled from their home. I was housed in foster care for a year until my mother cleaned up and took my brother and I back. By this time she had settled down and had two more kids. She was cleaned up, and found a good job, and for all that, I am so proud of her. Still to this day she remains clean and stable.
When I was eight, I started cutting and burning myself. I was diagnosed with manic depression. The older I got the worse the self mutilation got. I would break my own bones. It’s not that I wanted to die, I was just so numb.
In middle school I started smoking and drinking. I was in a relationship with a physically and verbally abusive boy, who actually pulled me out of the smoking. The one good deed he did.
When I was sixteen I finally took it too far and downed two bottles of Tylenol and a bottle of Xanax when I was home alone. When my mom found me, I was out, and foaming at the mouth. They rushed me to the hospital and pumped my stomach. They told my mother if I had been even five minutes later, I wouldn’t have made it.
I spent three months in a mental health facility where I was also diagnosed with Borderline personality disorder.
I stopped doing anything for about two years after that. When I turned 18 I quit my medications and stopped going to therapy. I didn’t feel like it was helping. I didn’t need somebody to tell me what was wrong with me. I knew, I had to feel it and live it everyday.
I still cut but never enough for anyone to notice. I will never do enough harm to put me back in that place again, just enough to keep feeling.
This is me.
I guess this is the first post on my new blog. It’s a kind of introductory post I suppose. I wont reveal my identity on here, since I have a main blog, but I’ll tell you about myself.
I’m a twenty year young girl (21 in January), living in the midwest. I’m quiet, mild mannered, and kept to myself. I have horrid social anxiety, and have a hard time being in large crowds. I struggle everyday with manic depression, borderline personality disorder, and obesity. I wake up in the mornings wishing that I hadn’t woken up at all. The weight of my mind is so heavy that I can feel physically feel it. It exhausts me, and makes me bones ache. I feel sick.
Things that I tend to fancy are books(Literature in general), music, coffee, tea, hot cocoa(I love warm beverages), art, imagination, originality, and mystery. Things that are a tad on the darker side of life, things that are macabre and taboo. Morbid.
I am alone.
All the time. I am alone in my struggles, and alone in my physical life. I am single, I live alone, I work from home. The only company I keep are from my two whiskered companions. I feel as though I might die this way and the thought terrifies me.
I’ve decided to start this blog in hopes that I can find somebody else that knows what I’m going through or other people who can help me survive this.
Any suggestions or support is much welcomed.
This blog may trigger things, so read with caution.
