Speaking from the Belly of The Beast: A depression letter.

  

Dear Depression, 

I wake up in the morning feeling overtired and stiff as a board, and the day has barely begun. I touch my face, and I feel the wetness of the tears that have blurred my once perfect vision. There were so many thoughts swimming through my mind. So many in fact, that it is almost impossible to differentiate between fact and fiction. You have been making deals with the devil so often that I begin to believe exactly what he has fed into my already disease-ridden mind. 

Every step I take towards normalcy and betterment is a hit to your heart. I know you do not want to see me even begin to become slightly better. You cannot survive without sucking every inch of air from my lungs. You cannot survive without the berating thoughts teeming through every pour and leaking from every vein. Your end goal is sick and twisted, yet I understand it with a perfect and keen eye. 

You have ravaged me so completely and so deeply that I now can see your motive with clear eyes and a bit of a haunted soul. Every time you seek to twist my mind so that your motive seems even the slightest bit normal, you win. You are fully aware of every game and every plot that you twist so that you make me miserable, and yet you are unrelenting. I will always dream of the day when I no longer must endure the pain and the shots to the heart that you so readily deliver, but deep down to the core of my soul, I know that it is exactly that. A pipe dream.   

They always say, once a sufferer of your pain, always one. This is the absolute and profound truth surrounding a mental illness of your scope. Over the years and as I have aged, I have gained infinite wisdom, and more importantly, coping mechanisms to make dealing with you just a fraction easier. You are so damn fickle and frustrating, though, because every bout and round I fight with you is different.   

Every round brings something entirely new to the surface. Sometimes, the negative feelings you feel may be associated with self-esteem and self-confidence. Sometimes you may struggle with identity and purpose. I feel like struggles with your individuality are normal within the course of your life. However, when you are dealing with depression, these struggles may increase ten-fold.  

Dealing with self-esteem and self-confidence issues when laden with depression may make it impossible for you to look in the mirror. If you can investigate your image looking back at you in the mirror, you may hesitate because you are so disgusted by what you see. So much so that you fear the glass breaking and the shards of glass scratching up your face. This may seem extreme to the average person or reader, but to someone who has always had to fight against you, this is something that is indeed very real and dare I say normal. 

As difficult as it may be to constantly fight you, each round is structured and meant to teach a specific lesson. Let us be honest, none of life’s lessons are meant to be caught onto easily. Each lesson serves as a framework to help you grow and evolve as a human being.  Learning to accept yourself in an overly critical and often cold world can be a hard pill to swallow. Though no human being on this Earth is perfect, society teases us in a way that demands that we follow pre-made up standards and adhere to them if we want to make our mark and fit in. 

This pressure to become perfect in the eyes of others then sends our depression into overdrive. We then think that we must produce in line with societal constructs or else we may never feel important enough to remain alive and breathing. 

As dramatic as that sounds, the pressure is very present and very raw and real. As humans, we want others to hear our sometimes-stifled voices, but even more than that, we want to be accepted and loved more than anything else. You make this goal seem as if we are asking to climb mount Everest without oxygen. You twist and distort our thoughts and words until they mean nothing and expect us to keep going.  

That is what we humans are trained to do after all. We are trained to keep on trucking, no matter how hard our life becomes. The bigger question then becomes the how's and the whys of turning you back into a monster we can manage. 

The healing process from a bout of depression begins with self-reflection and self-worth. It starts with talking to yourself in a positive manner, careful not to let those negative thoughts overtake your mind. It takes dealing with your problems in silence sometimes and really focusing on loving you for you. It means not caring what others may think of your flaws and mistakes. It means taking complete and total responsibility for your actions, no matter what the outcome may be. 

This is not easy, not in the slightest, and it will surely test your personal strength and your peace of mind. You will not always come out on top. Sometimes, the depression is just too relentless and will take over not caring how it affects you and others around you. It will not care that you have fought and won before. It cares how you react to the present circumstances and how you choose to allow them to carry over in your life situation. It does not care about age, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or ethnicity. If it can target you and attempt to turn your world upside down, it will do so with no remorse.  Without a doubt, the biggest obstacle you will face when depression hits are learning how to live with it and manage it to the best of your God-given ability. When in doubt of your own set of coping mechanisms, reach out for professional help. Reaching out for professional help does not mean that you are weak in any sense. It means that you are a human being trying to navigate the winding and twisting roads of life. Whether we like to admit it or not, we could all use a helping hand sometimes. 

If you do find that you need to take that extra step to recover and do so freely, take enormous pride in the want to get better. No one can deal with life completely alone. We all need other people to love and accept us as we are. Nothing more and nothing less. As mundane and awful as depression can become, I am grateful for the many lessons it has taught me and the increased strength I can now bolster because of being invaded, teased, and distraught by you. You have taught me that my strength will never abandon me, and for that, I am forever grateful, and as odd as it sounds, indebted to you.