You’re depressed. You’ve been depressed for a while. You’re probably kind of anxious. Maybe you’re a bit over-friendly with a substance or two. You have all the classic depression symptoms: you can’t concentrate; you’re exhausted but you can’t sleep; the things you used to love no longer bring you joy (can you even remember what they were?); your stomach hurts, your head hurts, your back hurts (and the tests keep saying nothing’s wrong); every minor irritation feels like nails on the chalkboard of your soul; you walk through life with misery clinging to you like a parasitic twin, a shapeless mass of flesh and teeth.
Maybe you want to die.
Maybe you’ve tried to die.
You’ve found a medication regime that works for you. It helps, but not enough. You’ve done a couple of rounds of CBT. You have a daily mindfulness practice. You exercise regularly, even when it feels like dragging your limbs through mud. Your sleep hygiene is impeccable (although your sleep is still kind of broken). You keep a gratitude diary. You fight through the fatigue and anxiety to make sure you stay in touch with family and friends. You have a daylight lamp on your desk. You eat five portions of fruit and veg a day, despite the nausea and cramps. Things aren’t as bad as they were.
They’re still bad. In the short days of winter you still find yourself wondering if it is absolutely necessary for you to live out the rest of your natural lifespan.
Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place. Maybe the problem is not in your mind or in your body but in the life you’re living. Maybe the depression is the symptom, not the cause, and no matter how diligently you tend the symptom the cause will still be festering beneath. Maybe being depressed isn’t a dysfunction, it’s a warning – every system doing its very best impression of a giant, red, flashing light telling you something is wrong.
Maybe your job is sucking your soul out through your eyeballs.
Maybe you’re trapped in a relationship (familial, intimate, platonic, whatever) with someone who’s abusing you.
Maybe you’re trans and drowning in dysphoria.
Maybe you’re me at eighteen, you’ve just dropped out of your fourth school in four years, and you can’t explain why. All you know is that you do everything you can to get better, and you do get better! And you decide to try going back to school. And it gets worse again. And if it gets bad enough you find yourself, again, in a bed on a psychiatric ward with a waterproof mattress, a nightstand screwed to the floor, a bedside light with a plastic lightbulb.
Maybe you’re disabled. Maybe you’re ignoring your autism spectrum diagnosis and you haven’t even realised you have ADHD. Maybe you need to embrace your identity as a disabled, neurodiverse person and learn to thrive in it. Maybe you’re writing this because you can’t reach back through time to say to your younger self you’re looking in the wrong place, you’re trying to be someone you can never be, you will keep ending up here unless you accept and embrace who you are.
Maybe the depression is the symptom. Not the cause.
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