What does it mean when you have this need to reread Hyperbole and A Half’s comic about her struggle with a major depressive episode and have a weird, awesome sad time catharticly (this is not a word) laughing and crying all over it?
Probably that it’s time to give up on trying to be productive today and go to sleep?
Or that I should force myself to power through and check off at least one more thing I failed to do today?
Well, before I do any of that, let me just think-type out loud to you.
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When you tell people you’ve been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, you need to prepare yourself for the gamut of reactions. And you need to prepare yourself for questions and comments that sound totally stupid, and ignorant, and insensitive, and maybe a little blaming, but you know come from a place of love, of concern, and probably fear (of the diagnosis and what it means, and fear of what might happen to you, not necessarily fear of you, or maybe a little bit of that, I don’t know, I hope not, but I don’t know).
Because you will hear things like, Oh that’s not a big deal, right? Everybody’s a little depressed. Or things like, what changes are you going to make? And you want to say, No, not everybody is a little depressed. Everybody might be a little sad or a little negative. Not everybody is happy but depression is something altogether different.
When you wake up one day, hating the world and everyone around you because the world is completely falling apart and there are concrete, even if abstract and not altogether personal, reasons, that’s one thing. If you’re not happy with your life, you either make different choices and change the way you live, think, or feel and move on and be happier. Or you don’t and you stay unhappy and probably depressed. So where is that dividing line between just being unhappy and unwilling to make the changes you need to be in a better place and being so incomprehensively deep into it that you don’t even know where to begin?
When you wake up hating the world, hating yourself, knowing that you’ve had a harder life than most people you know but yet you survived it and you’re here and you’re awesome - even though you’re still not in a very good place - but you are in so many other ways - when you wake up hating yourself and your life to this extent, even when you know better, even when the worst thing that has happened to you in the last few days is something as trivial as spilt milk, and you fantasize for a few seconds about how death would be an immense relief, that’s another thing.
That’s a whole other ugly, scary, incomprehensible, monstrous thing.
And I can appreciate that there is no black and white to this. There are going to be many things that I can do to change the way I think about things and those small steps will ultimately change the way I think about life and if the theory holds true, I will be happier. But there are going to be moments like this when there are no identifiable triggers and I just felt like people need to recognize that this happens, and know that this is part of the package.
And not that anyone cares, or even noticed, but I did notice that I wrote most of this post in the second-person POV, unconsciously distancing myself from a very personal account of what mornings often look like for me, and you know, that’s poignant, I guess, you know, if this were a novel and you were an AP English Lit class.. but this isn’t, so… Never mind.
