Depression
Depression
Do you feel hopeless, empty, or defeated? Does it feel like excitement and joy have been drained from your life, and replaced by unshakable sadness, melancholy, or emptiness? Perhaps you can’t remember the last time you were ever truly happy at all.
Are you feeling tired, lethargic, or like you’re too exhausted to do anything? Do “simple” tasks feel insurmountable? Do you feel like your life is pointless, or meaningless, or too painful to survive?
Perhaps you feel alone and isolated, or like you’re a burden on others. Perhaps your motivation is gone and you can’t see a way forward towards goals that once seemed meaningful to you.
Depression sucks. Really—depression can feel like all joy, energy, motivation, hope, or desire has been sucked right out of you, as if by a sinister vacuum of despair. It can leave you feeling like a shell of yourself. It might leave you feeling impossibly burdened, heavy, unloved and unwanted.
Perhaps other people in your life can’t seem to understand, which makes you feel even worse, and more isolated. Insidiously, depression can also cause you to feel guilty, ashamed, and full of self-loathing. This feeds the cycle of low mood, low energy, and other debilitating symptoms that can cause people with depression to feel painfully, impossibly stuck.
Depression is physically and emotionally exhausting. You might have difficulty with memory, functioning, obsessive thoughts, suicidal thinking, mood swings, anger and irritability, lack of motivation, lack of pleasure, oversleeping, and the desire to not exist. It can feel like just surviving day to day takes an almost unbearable amount of physical and emotional energy.
It’s not just you! Depression is extremely common, and probably more common than even the official numbers might suggest. Unfortunately, the nature of this beast causes many people to stifle their pain and suffering, or bear it privately, internally.
However, one of the most effective steps in treating depression is to enlist the help and support of a trained mental health professional. I have seen firsthand how therapy has helped people with depression start to create shift in their symptoms, and begin to relate to themselves with more compassion and hope than they previously thought possible.
Healing IS Possible.
Reaching out for help might seem like another “should” to add to your already insurmountable “should” pile. Further, the shame and self-aggression that are often present for people struggling with depression make taking this step even more challenging. There might be a stigma around seeing a therapist, or some internalized notion that you “should” (there’s that word again) just “get over it already.”
These are all signs that, in fact, reaching out for help is exactly what will help you overcome depression. I like to frame it as one of the most courageous acts of self-care possible. And while it might seem daunting to begin depression therapy, it is often the beginning of a journey to overcoming your symptoms and finding a way to regain your sense of self in life. It might seem like a big step, but it is a radical step of self-compassion which may be precisely the antidote you need.
