How would you describe depression to someone who’s never had it?

Everything matters too much and nothing matters.

Imagine that you get up one day, and spend that day doing one of your favorite hobbies. You get to hang out with your friends, doing things you love. There’s good food and nothing bad happens that day. Heck, let’s even imagine the weather is perfect. And at the end of that day, doing all the things you love around the people you like in the best possible way you feel… average. OK. Not-awful.

That’s one big part of depression. It’s not that you “feel sad” more often, it’s that the whole range of your feelings shifts downward. A normal person feels bad sometimes, feels good sometimes, and feels OK or average most of the time. Depression shifts that whole window down, so that your best day is “OK”, your worst feels awful, and most of the time, you’re hurting.

And if you’re like most people, your brain is this amazing pattern-matching thing with no off-switch. Normally, if you feel angry or tired, you start looking for a cause: “Oh, I forgot to eat breakfast” or “I was really hoping my boss would like my proposal, and he didn’t” and then things make sense. But if you’re depressed, you feel awful all the time for no clear reason at all, and over time, that alone is pretty distressing.

I’ve said it before: feeling fucked-up when you’re in a fucked-up situation doesn’t mean you’re a fuck-up, it means you’re a human being. If your dad has dementia and your mom can’t walk anymore and you just put down your dog, you should feel awful. But when dad’s got caregiver and so does mom and you have a decent job and your spouse loves you and you still feel awful all the time… that’s depression. And your tireless pattern-matching brain eventually says stuff like “Hey, why don’t you blow up your job/marriage/friendships, that way at least the way you’re feeling right now will make sense!” Or, if things go on long enough, your brain will say “we’re hurting all the time. We tried doing things we like, and we still hurt. We tried not doing things, and we still hurt. So clearly, the reason we’re hurting is that we’re still existing… what if we could change that?”

For me it was fatigue that was so intense I would avoid even going to the bathroom for as long as possible just to stay in bed.
The second thing was this dark awareness that there isn’t really anything that I’m longing for that would make a difference. For example, when you have a flu or something and you lay in bed feeling like crap, you know that in a couple days you will feel better. When I was depressed, there was no relief to look forward to. No light at the end of the tunnel. I couldn’t think of a single thing that would make me happy.

It’s not laziness. You feel so numb It’s hard to even get out of bed to go to the toilet. You just feel numb all the time and get anger outbursts.

It’s different for every one but for me it’s being tired all the time. You have moments when maybe you feel ok but as soon as you start something you’re tired. Just so tired.

Edit: for spelling.

Life is passing by and you don’t enjoy the movie. You see yourself moving, talking, but it is not you. You do not feel but you remember that feelings exist. You can’t sleep and you can’t be awake.
Windows and bridges are calling you and you have to put big effort not to follow this call.

Like being more bored than you can possibly imagine but also not being able to imagine a single thing you actually want to do no matter how hard you try, including thinking and breathing.

The smallest task can feel impossible. The mere thought makes you feel worse.

Extreme apathy. Dream state. Everything is dull and heavy all at once.

1. Everything feels overwhelming. At my worst, something as simple as emptying the garbage – 60 seconds at most – felt like such an ordeal that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I’d let it sit for weeks.

2. On a scale of 1-10, most people wake up at a 5. Good things bring them up, bad things bring them down, but they’re comfortably in that middle zone. When my depression was unchecked, my default state was 2. So even if something absolutely amazing happened, it still only brought me up to a 3 or 4, and only temporarily. Once the high wore off, I was back in the gutter.

3. You lose interest in your hobbies. You lose the motivation needed to find new hobbies. You find yourself with a free evening, and you could spend the entire thing just spinning around in your office chair, staring at the ceiling, because you don’t feel like doing anything.

It almost feels like a physical thing that’s weighing down on you. Like being covered in a wet blanket of sadness, but there’s no way to take it off. It’s so heavy that you know you can’t do anything about it, so you just let it suffocate you. And it makes everything you enjoy less impactful. Colors seem dim, food tastes bland, the song that meant the world to you now seems meaningless… Every positive thing is diminished.

Sarah Silverman said it feels like being desperately homesick even though you’re home. I’d agree but modify it to feeling homesick for a home that doesn’t exist.

It’s a nothing-ness. Someone from my old school killed herself and my mom said “I can’t imagine it (life?) being so dark that suicide feels like the only option”. I wanted to tell her that it’s not always a darkness, for some it’s just nothing and sadness all the time. Just clean apathy. And sometimes fear of getting in the car and having to drive somewhere alone.

It’s like living someplace where it snows all the time.

Some days it’s only a couple of inches. It’s a pain in the ass, but you still make it to work, the grocery store. Sure, maybe you skip the gym or your friend’s birthday party, but it IS still snowing and who knows how bad it might get tonight. (…)

Some days it snows a foot. You spend an hour shovelling out your driveway and are late to work. Your back and hands hurt from shovelling. You leave early because it’s really coming down out there. Your boss notices.

Some days it snows four feet. You shovel all morning but your street never gets plowed. You are not making it to work, or anywhere else for that matter. You are so sore and tired you just get back in the bed. By the time you wake up, all your shovelling has filled back in with snow. (…)

Some weeks it’s a full-blown blizzard. When you open your door, it’s to a wall of snow. The power flickers, then goes out. It’s too cold to sit in the living room anymore, so you get back into bed with all your clothes on. (…)

The thing is, when it snows all the time, you get worn all the way down. You get tired of being cold. You get tired of hurting all the time from shovelling, but if you don’t shovel on the light days, it builds up to something unmanageable on the heavy days. (…)

Also, the snow builds up in other areas, places you can’t shovel, sometimes places you can’t even see. Maybe it’s on the roof. Maybe it’s on the mountain behind the house. Sometimes, there’s an avalanche that blows the house right off its foundation and takes you with it.

The neighbors say it’s a shame and they can’t understand it.

He was doing so well with his shovelling.

Driving to the grocery store and knowing you need to buy milk and bread and getting a great parking spot but not having the energy to go in.

And by energy, it feels like there is a greater gravitational force on your body that is pulling you to the core of the earth.

Every step feels heavier. Moving your body is harder.

No one else is suffering from this gravity issue. They are all moving normally. This is painfully obvious.

So you go home. Milk and bread can wait for another day.

I’d recommend reading this.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-part-two.html

You know the arc in Dragon Ball Z where Goku trains in 100x gravity and every little movement is extremely difficult for him?

It’s exactly like that, but you’re not Goku. You just lay on the floor for 6 months.

It’s like seeing life through a black and white filter while constantly feeling exhausted with everything around you. It’s the utter and complete lack of hope that eventually turns to apathy. Your body hurts, and you know there is nothing physically wrong with you. You are so, so tired but sleep doesn’t happen at all, or when it does it feels like you can’t wake up, and at that point you don’t even really want to. There is this nagging emptiness inside of you, kind of like hunger, but nothing can fill it up and eventually, you go numb. If you do get sick, you don’t bother going to a doctor because you hope whatever you have finally just gets worse and kills you in a way that you will feel guilt free over.

That’s what it felt like for me, at least.

Having a constant liar in your head that’s telling you you’re shit, you’re a burden, you’re stressing people out, people are disappointed in you. Etc etc etc. At least that’s it for me. Sometimes less prevalent than other times. Therapy has helped me a lot with managing symptoms but when I go into a depressive wave, that liar is SHOUTING.

Cilantro tastes like soap to me; I wonder what it actually tastes like. That’s akin to how I wonder how people without depression feel. I’d never know

Living hurts