On Getting Depressed

Depression and anxiety are the two wheels of the cart that carries me through life. They can both be unspeakably awful, but for most of the time they’re simply the emotional basis of my average day. Anxiety is the most conspicuous of the demons, taking hold of everything I do, from the minute to the massive, and while it ebbs and flows, it is forever constant. Depression is a different animal, crueller-sounding, the very word is like an immovable tombstone. While unquestionably ever-present, I used to think that depression just came and went – some days I’d be ‘normal’, and every now and then depression would creep up on me like inclement weather, and I’d switch from one mode of being into another. As time has gone by and I at least entertain the idea that I’ve gotten to know myself better, I realise that depression does indeed come and go, but that I don’t have to be cutting myself, starving myself and actively seeking my own destruction for depression to still be with me, watching from a distance.

In the same way that I doubt myself on everything – that I doubt I’m a drug addict, or doubt that people like me, even doubt if I’m feeling happy or doubt that I’m really sad – I doubt whether or not I really have depression. That sounds kind of strange considering the very first sentence of this post, but it’s true. After all, I’ve never tried to kill myself. It might be arrogance which causes me to believe that killing myself will not involve a ‘try’, and barring the classic change of heart or the auspices of fate, if I decide to end it, it will be the end. That probably sounds redundant to people who haven’t considered ending it all that often in their life, but the desire to ‘call for help’ is a powerful drive, and one I’ve fallen to the allure of before, cutting my wrists at school and such. But I haven’t ended it. Despite everything, and despite fantasising about it regularly – the method, the sensation, the aftermath that I shan’t be present for – I clearly haven’t considered things to have been bad enough that my loving family, who are wonderful, and my many adoring friends, who are amazing, deserve to attend my premature funeral. That sounds like a relief and a positive, which it is, but to me it’s also the fact that keeps me wondering: if I’m carrying on living, who’s to say my bellyaching and wallowing isn’t the product of my own self-centred narcissism? Essentially, is my misery valid?

I don’t expect anyone to understand this, but it’s how things are. Of course I’m not totally convinced by these doubts, and seem to accept that something in me finds the very fundament of being alive to be quite a struggle. And that’s not even to speak of my overwhelming privilege, where I am practically the definition of someone who has enjoyed a staggering amount of leniency for a human on Planet Earth. But happiness is more arcane than that. Things are certainly better than when I was younger, before drugs solved a number of problems while immediately presenting new ones, but I still spend most of my time thinking an array of complicated follies that all end in the same phrase: ‘Why bother?’ Having been on (and occasionally off) antidepressants for a long, long, long time, as long as I can literally remember, I do feel that the savagest of wolves are being kept from the door. But in keeping with the universe’s theme, antidepressants bring with them their own saddening drawbacks, as I feel that for all the misery that they temper, many true, sober joys are also diluted into something tepid and numb. But I should write about that some other time.

Depression has come to me in several forms. The weirdest, maybe the most alarming, are the few intense instances where depression has crossed the threshold of deep but understandable misery and into something panicked, as if the world has abandoned me and I feel assaulted by something huge, awful and invisible, to the point of acting out in some way, whether through a drug binge or bizarre moments of self-harm accompanied with aimless, tearful wanderings. One instance involving my flatmate finding me at the end of our road, arms scratched and bleeding, hysterical, and with no memory exactly of how I got there. Those have been the extreme moments, where the misery took complete control of me, to the point that my own memory refuses to be there for me. They’re quite bad, pretty bad, but they’re mercifully infrequent.

The more common depressive spells are ones that should be familiar to everyone – painfully low mood, complete apathy towards being alive, self-neglect, long periods between fits of crying spent staring at the walls. These are also pretty bad, in a sense worse because of how much more accustomed I am to them. In these states, no positive emotion I ever felt in the past is seen as valid, sometimes even turning to delusions that I have never been happy, ever, and all I’ve felt is the misery I’m with in those moments. This is the part where I believe that this could be an ‘illness’, not so much a disposition, as during these moments I believe, one hundred percent, in easily disprovable delusions that keep me miserable. Even when I know that my depressions come and go, and I’ve had too many of these downward plummets to even count, and they’ve always dissolved, eventually, when I’m in that particularly sad moment, I know that this time, this time, everything I feel is completely justified, and nothing on Earth can convince me otherwise.

Aside from all the self-sabotage and the fact that very little gets done during these instances, age (and, importantly, fantastic support from the people around me) has taught me better ways of, to put it bluntly, dealing with it. But there’s another form of depression that’s maybe the most insidious. It has a quieter personality, not making of me any urgent demands, but rather keeping me in a persistent state of anhedonia and pessimism, which I inhabit in the same way a fish has no concept of the water in which it swims. Things seem fine, functional, even. But the vapid boredom of the world around me makes sinister means of escape, through drugs, or sex, or old-fashioned life-wasting, all the more tempting. Even on my best days, I walk suspiciously through the world, wondering what goodness actually exists around me, if any. And despite the luxury of my many friends and neighbours, there’s rarely a moment when I don’t feel, in some way, alone. This is the way in which it seems depression isn’t just a frequent bastardisation of my otherwise carefree life, it’s as necessary as the blood in my veins and the air I breathe. This might sound ghastly, which it is, but as I said before, I’m still alive, and anything before the completeness of death means that the possibilities are endless, joy is still to be had, horizons are still there to be explored, and people are still around for me to enjoy their weird variety. I’m sure lots of people feel bad, all the time. I’m not so special. But I did feel compelled to put this absurdity into writing. So I did. I also intend to carry on living way beyond the foreseeable future in case you were wondering. Life is too weird and fascinating a cosmic phenomenon to miss out on.