Living with depression

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO): Depression is a common mental disorder that presents with depressed mood, loss of interest or pleasure, feelings of guilt or low self-worth, disturbed sleep or appetite, low energy, and poor concentration.

According to MedicineNet.com: [Depression is] An illness that involves the body, mood, and thoughts, that affects the way a person eats and sleeps, the way one feels about oneself, and the way one thinks about things. A depressive disorder is not the same as a passing blue mood. It is not a sign of personal weakness or a condition that can be wished away. People with a depressive disease cannot merely "pull themselves together" and get better. Without treatment, symptoms can last for weeks, months, or years. Appropriate treatment, however, can help most people with depression.

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I am now 38 and I've had episodes of major depression since my teens. Some of these episodes lasted for years at a time. I can't pinpoint when I had my first episode of depression. My childhood was turbulent and often very unhappy. My anxiety levels were high most of the time. I remember times, at primary school age, when I felt very bleak, despairing and often desperate. I remember many times wishing that I would die in my sleep, just so that I wouldn't have to face another day of my life. So I suppose my depression actually started long before I entered my teens.

In the end, it doesn't really matter when it started because it feels like depression has been my lifelong companion.

As I write this, I think I'm experiencing yet another down-turn. Writing about how I feel is a coping mechanism that I hope will help me to feel a little better. I am on medication and am in therapy. Both help me but right now, it feels like the black fog of depression is stronger than medication, therapy and my own determination to get better. I struggle to explain just how discouraging and demoralising that is. I'm employing all the weapons I currently have in my arsenal but the black fog rolls through them like they don't exist. I sometimes wonder how long I can fight this illness. Occasionally, I still find myself thinking that it would be best if I simply died in my sleep. At least then I would get real rest.

It feels to me like depression robs me of who I am and that makes me angry. This illness invaded my head and stole part of me. I don't think I was meant to go through life encased in this thick black fog, able to see the fuzzy outlines of happiness, peace and self-confidence but not able to reach out and grab what belongs to me. At the same time, the voice in my head tells me that I don't deserve those things anyway. They are not for me. For others, yes, but not for me.

Depression is tiring. People who've never suffered from depression, especially long-term major depression, have no idea how soul-destroyingly tiring it is to be depressed. You don't ever get a break from it. You can laugh on the outside and act as if everything is fine and for a little while, you can even feel that way. But it's always there, waiting to cloak you in bleakness and despair, even as you desperately count up all the ways in which you are fortunate - your job, home, family, friends, interests, pets. It doesn't matter how many times I read about the illness called depression. It doesn't feel like an illness. It feels like weakness, self-indulgence, self-pity. I tell myself, Snap out of it! But I don't snap out of it and so the guilt and sense of failure piles on.

At this moment, as I write this, I feel like a waste of time and space. I can't imagine how I contribute anything useful to this world. I'm tired of feeling depressed and anxious. I'm tired of my lack of confidence, my inability to concentrate at work, of feeling like I'm worthless and a lost cause. I'm tired of fighting all the damn time just to feel human.