Three Tips for Understanding Your Depression
Our culture has specific ways of depicting what depression looks like: sleeping late into the day, take out containers scattered around the apartment, messy buns, marathon TV sessions in sweatpants on the couch, and not responding to loved ones' worried pleas. While each can represent different aspects of depressive symptoms (bathing or grooming less frequently, isolating from friends and family, decreasing energy and interest in activities a person typically finds enjoyable), depression usually looks different from person to person.
Depression can also feel like a longing for the sun to rise in the morning because our half asleep, half-waking thoughts feel distorted and confusing in the middle of the night. For some, depression takes the form of forgetting mundane tasks because sadness drains every ounce of energy. It can feel like a mental fog. It can feel like losing friends due to a lack of motivation to maintain friendships.
However, depression may also look like a person surrounding themselves with friends, prioritizing the needs and wants of others, feeling fueled by bringing joy to others, even at the expense of self-deprecating humor.
To cope with depression, we must begin with understanding your unique reaction to your feelings. Of course, unpacking depression might feel both freeing and deflating. If you're struggling with depression, I invite you to begin to explore and respond to your experience through the following steps.
Begin to understand depression in a way that makes sense to you. Does depression feel like part of you, coexisting and sometimes taking center stage in your life? Or is depression more external, something with a life of its own, lingering around for an afternoon, a week, or longer? However you identify with your depression that helps you understand and respond to it, it is entirely up to you.
Respond to depression. I encourage clients to put together a response for when their depression feels particularly present. Find time when you're not overwhelmed to structure a phrase that feels fitting, one that you could imagine yourself communicating to another person when you're knee-deep in depression. Your response may include a few of these topics: Sharing how it feels good to be included, how you appreciate the person you are communicating with, that life feels heavy today, that you need to prioritize your health, and right now that looks like staying in (or going out, whatever the case may be). You can explain that this relationship is essential to you, and a text from them in a few days to check-in would feel supportive. If it's helpful, save what you write in your phone for when "copy and paste" is all the energy you have.
Finally, there may be a time when considering medication to help manage depression is appropriate. This point will also look different from person to person. It's ok to acknowledge that you haven't been feeling like yourself or that it's been such a long time since you've experienced joy that you barely remember who you are anymore. For some, medication might be helpful for a short period of time, while others may find a medication that suits them in reducing symptoms more long term. Either way, medication is intended to be one tool in the box of many that support us in managing our symptoms.
If you're struggling with depression, I hope this resonates with you. If you are in the trenches, despite what your depression may be telling you, please remember you are not alone in your struggles. You are worthy of love exactly as you are. Depression can lie to us and say that life will feel hard forever. You don't have to suffer in silence, and I promise, help is available, and there will be brighter days ahead.