What depression feels like (to me)

If I had to pinpoint the first time in my life that I experienced depression, I would probably say it was during the first semester of my senior year of high school. Officially, I had become a new student at the school the year prior, starting my junior year in a new school district, walking into school on day one with a plan to ask some nice-looking students if I could sit with them at lunch, because other than a few acquaintances from my church I didn't know anyone. Interestingly enough, my first day of junior year I met someone who would turn out to be one of my best friends -- we ate lunch together every day that year, and we are still in touch today, some 20+ years later. 

But I remember very clearly the night before starting senior year that I felt like the next day was going to be my first day at that school all over again. Other than my one very good friend, I hadn't made many other friends at school my junior year. I didn't know who I was going to sit with during my lunch period, and I felt nervous, the way one might if they in fact didn't know anyone at all, as had actually been the case a year before. The nervousness was legitimate, but the circumstances didn't match or explain why it might be present -- after a year, I should have felt like I would be walking into a building full of familiar, friendly faces. 

As that first semester of senior year progressed, I felt -- without really realizing it or having language to describe it -- very without friends, without connection, without a lot of joy. I went to school, came home and did my homework. When I wasn't doing homework, I read books, watched movies checked out from the library, or watched TV on one of our few basic network channels. More than once I recall doing my calculus homework on a Friday night, because there was no other robust social activity taking place in my life. A couple of times I think I forced (dared?) myself to go to school football games, in an attempt to socialize? live a more normal high school life? I'm not even sure, but I still stood in the stands among strangers, I believe, or acquaintances at best. I never had plans to meet someone specific there, no one was waiting or saving a seat for me.

Throughout August, September, October of that year, I carried around these feelings I didn't have words for, and just progressively felt more and more uncomfortable, unhappy. I had checked out Father of the Bride (the novel, not the movie) from the library, and came home one day after school and tried to read it on the couch in the living room. I couldn't concentrate on the sentences on the page, and as this persistent ache built up inside of me I finally set aside the book and wept, alone in the silent house. I didn't understand why I was crying, or what was happening to me exactly, I just knew it hurt. The way I felt inside, emotionally, was painful, both dull and deep, and just absolutely would not let up. 

Just before Halloween I developed a freak illness, with bizarre, painful, and specific symptoms that led to a terrifying misdiagnosis and ultimately, by Christmas, a clean bill of health. There never was a determinate cause for why I experienced such symptoms, and to this day I'm convinced it was from stress and just bottling up all that mental turmoil. After a week out of school and several follow up doctors visits, I remember at some point during my final semester of high school telling myself, "You're going to college in six months, just try and enjoy the people and things around you that bring you some joy, and everything will change soon." I gave myself permission to kind of ease off the gas of my worry, reminding myself that my whole life would be entirely different a year from then. 

In fact, it was. I did very well socially and emotionally (overall) in college. After moving around so many times in my adolescence, I was a head and shoulders above all my classmates in terms of meeting new people, talking to strangers, making friends. Some of my friends marveled at the fact that I would sometimes eat alone in the cafeteria -- really, I just wasn't good at time management and oftentimes it would be 1:45 and I'd realize I need to hustle over to the dining hall before they stopped serving lunch. To me, it was a necessity, a practical response to my lack of planning, whereas my peers always scheduled to meet up and eat together. Our perspectives were entirely different -- I hadn't come from a past reality where mealtime partners were a given, so I didn't expect them to always be there. 

I went to a small school, and pretty much everywhere I walked across campus I said hi and stopped to chat with people I knew. While I absolutely carried around some pretty severe and embarrassing anxiety that I tried to hide from my classmates at times during college, overall the environment was one where I felt very safe, happy, and where I thrived. At some point I did my schoolwork (always at 4 a.m., mind you), as evidenced by my diploma, but when I think back to those years I mostly remember just laughing and talking with my friends. It was a full on chatter fest, all the time. I had people who made me feel happy and excited and bubbly when I saw them, we had shared jokes, we whispered about our crushes, we ate ice cream, we hugged upon every new meeting each day. We loved each other and being around each other. 

So it was when I left that magic collegiate bubble that depression -- this time REAL depression, much deeper, darker, and scarier than before -- really started to seep into my life. I actually recall anticipating that I might be depressed after graduation, and also thinking that I just wouldn't let myself be depressed. 

Ha! Yeah right. I WISH.

If only one could control it, stave it off, say no thank you and shut the door on the most unwelcome of visitors. That strange idea that I thought I could just not feel depression if I didn't want to is one that has never entered my head again since. Because unfortunately I know better now, having experienced depression -- in bouts as quick as a passing 30 seconds to, I don't know, weeks? months? at at time? -- on and off since I was about 21 or 22 years old. 

It's both fascinating and maddening to me when people describe depression as feeling numb. If I had the option to feel numb, i.e. nothing, over what I in fact feel when I'm depressed, oh people I would choose it every dang time! Are you kidding me?! When I feel depressed, it is always an uncomfortable, un-ignorable, very unfair and nagging emotional pain. It is a low, not a medium or a neutral space. It is not often accompanied by tears -- in fact, when tears do come they offer a welcome relief; rarely a lasting one, but they help ease up the moment almost for sure, to an extent. Depression hurts. It sucks. It feels inescapable, because as far as I've experienced (and I have experienced, many many many times) it is inescapable, until it decides on its own terms that it will now leave you alone for an undetermined amount of time.

Absolutely things like exercise (particularly for me getting my heart rate up to a certain intensity level; running is the most effective) make a considerable difference and can help bring in some light, some air, something of a break, but if my body/brain decide they are going to be depressed, I have exactly zero control over how long that will be the case. Depression has its own timeline, its own calendar, and if you experience it like I do where it has come and gone for nearly two decades of my life, you don't have any belief within you that this will not always be the case. I always expect it to come back, I just don't know when. And I keep up on my exercise, and make sleep a priority, so that hopefully it will delay its next appearance in my schedule, and/or be less intense when it arrives. 

Depression manifests itself in varying ways within me, and I'd say most of the time most of the people in my life probably don't pick up on its presence, unless I say out loud, "I'm feeling depressed." And I do say that, probably way more often than a lot of other people do. Honestly it probably gets construed as a casual expression, in the way I just insert it into everyday conversation, but the feeling within me is anything but casual. It always hurts, I always want to get away from it, want it to pass, wish I didn't have to suffer. But I experience it so often and have been in therapy for so many years and taken meds for so long that this depression talk is my second language -- or, really, my native language at this point.

I don't say it to shock people, or to ask for attention. I think I say that I'm depressed so people know that it's there -- because they can't see it, and often can't sense it. I can feel absolutely awful, terrible, completely pessimistic and hopeless, unable to draw a positive thought to the surface of my mind (for days, sometimes), and people will think I'm fine -- happy, in fact. I'm not trying to act fine, it's just that depression isn't (apparently) obvious to those outside of the body that is experiencing it.

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me, "But you're so well adjusted," "You seem so put together," "You seem so happy," "You're so positive," I'd be riiiiiiiiich. I want to be authentic, and I want people to know the truth of how I'm feeling, I think because if nothing else I spend so much time and pained energy looking at other people's lives and thinking/assuming they are happy/not depressed, and it makes me so jealous and mad. And I guess I want people to look at me and know the truth of what's going on in this head and heart of mine, so they don't assume I'm feeling good and treat me as such. And, I wish that they would be honest and authentic in return. 

I am by no means going to cover all the ways that depression feels for me, the ways it appears in my life, within this one blog post. But I want to try and describe at least some of the ways it can feel or be experienced by me, so people know and maybe to see if others share the same types of experiences and feelings.

For example, depression is often described and experienced as being unable to get out of bed, or not wanting to get out of bed. My experience is quite the opposite -- particularly if I'm well aware that I'm in a bout of depression, I will intentionally make myself get up, go to work, exercise, and not stay in bed past the time that I am sleeping. 

Depression often makes me think in one of two ways -- I either assume everyone around me (coworkers, friends, strangers in line with me at Starbucks) is happier than I am, not experiencing any depression of any kind or at least not at the level that I'm experiencing it, OR I project my depression onto literally everyone I see in the grocery store, passing by my car window as they walk on the sidewalk. My brain will absolutely think and believe that everyone feels terrible, that we are all feeling hopeless, that this life is crummy and we all hate it together and are clawing, desperately hoping for better feelings of joy to come be within us. If this is how I experience and perceive the world around us, why wouldn't we all be experiencing the same world in the same way?

I can go quiet, find it difficult to speak a word or a simple sentence into a simple conversation. Every thought that runs through my head is negative, and I feel I'm either going to bring the mood down for everyone else if I say one of them out loud, or it just feels pointless to say any of my words -- what change will it make in how I feel? I will sit through whole group dinners and barely say a word (usually this is with family, whereas if I try this around friends who know me to be gregarious/sarcastic/obnoxious, they might be more likely to call out my unusual behavior and I may feel uncomfortable with the prospect of addressing it in the company of those who aren't immediate family and are therefore less familiar with my private emotional tendencies).

For those who are more intimately familiar with my seasons of depression -- my family and my romantic partner -- they can try and cheer me up. This can make me mad, or I can be appreciative but someone trying to get me to smile (and even being able to do it) doesn't have any sort of significant impact on how I feel, nor does it speed up the process of getting the depression to abate. 

Alternatively, getting around people and socializing almost always can make me feel markedly better, if I'm in the midst of a very low, dark, hopeless state, but generally just getting me to laugh at something silly one is doing is not going to make much of a difference in how I feel. 

I see those close to me get concerned, worried, fearful, impatient, or angry in response to my feeling depressed. Save for the depression itself, knowing that they feel upset is perhaps the worst part of all of this. Some of the hardest moments in my memory have to do with someone who loves me deeply not being able to understand how I'm feeling, why I act the way I do, why I can become mute at the dinner table, why their silly antics don't fix a damn thing, why them caring for me isn't enough to make me feel or be better.

To this point, I'll say another thing that is among the most lonely, frightening, and infuriating factors of life with depression is that -- for me at least -- it is often not enough to just know I am loved. This is a  message that often gets shared, both with me personally, and within social media accounts and organizations trying sincerely to help those who experience mental illness: you are loved. You are not alone. 

These are valuable messages, but I have in fact and in very full, devastating truth, many times seen a text message or heard someone say out loud how much they love me in the face of my depression, and in that moment, that season, it doesn't help me feel any better. 

I think we have this belief in our society -- and maybe it's true for those who grow up in less loving homes than the one I came up in, for those who have lower self esteem and haven't known very often or ever that they have a lot of family and friends who love them -- that being loved, admired, liked, or valued is the only ingredient needed to make you feel good and happy, both overall and within a particular moment. For me, unfortunately, this has not proven to be true. 

In so many ways I have been dealt the most positive, loving hand of cards in life -- an affectionate, loving family; safe school and church environments where I was never mistreated or touched inappropriately; a body that is proportionately sized with no missing limbs or visible defects; never a day wondering when my next meal might be -- and yet, I struggle, from what I can tell, in ways and intensities far beyond what several of my peers do. I so wish it were enough to know that I am loved, to be able to watch a silly 30 minute sitcom episode and snap out of it, but that so very much is not the case. 

I don't share any of this to scare anyone -- believe me, I think about certain people reading this and it makes me upset to think how it will make them feel -- but just to make known what depression has felt like for me. For a couple of weeks now I've been thinking about writing down some of these descriptions; I'm curious if others' experiences are similar or not at all like mine. Particularly when I hear of the classic cases of "can't get out of bed" or "feeling numb," I just scratch my head in wonder at how those manifestations (particularly the second one) can possibly be the same "depression" I speak of in my life.

What I've written here is just barely scratching the surface, too, of the many nuanced experiences I have had over the years with a depressed state of mind. I'm not kidding when I say it will just flicker across my synapses in the middle of a workday, randomly. I'll be sitting there typing and will feel this sudden sense of gloom, for no sensible reason whatsoever. And it will pass in 60 seconds. (Other times, please know, it is not nearly as fleeting or forgiving.) It is bizarre, and I cannot control when or how often or how intensely it will occur. This has been, and continues to be my experience. 

I suppose I will stop here for now. I may write a follow-up post to describe some more of the specific ways I experience depression -- or hey! Maybe for funsies will talk about anxiety! Yay! -- but today I will just leave this with you. As an edification for you, or perhaps as a way to see that you're not alone. Because as I mentioned whereas simply knowing you are not alone -- particularly when you're in the thick, thick, thick of it -- may not always be enough in the moment to help, it is still a valuable truth, a truth that is worthwhile to hold with you in between seasons of emotional difficulty.

Xox,
Bailey