I Married Depression

One of my favorite songs in the world is called Underneath. A melancholy ballad about how it feels when you realize that love can’t conquer anything. When it just isn’t enough.

Waking up this morning thinking maybe this can’t be real.
But they say there is nothing love can’t heal.

This. This is what it feels like to live with someone, share a life with someone, who suffers from depression. For all of their beautiful smiles, loving moments and amazing attributes there are ten more frowns, fights and immeasurable frustrations.

A lot of people think that being depressed means that someone is sad all of the time. Someone who can’t get out of bed, or really even function as a person. Others think that the person living with depression just needs to shake themselves out of it, push themselves harder. I’ve thought those things. I’ve thought them a lot, but I’m starting to realize how wrong I was.

The depression I’ve chosen to share my life with functions well every day. My depression is a wonderful parent, a hard worker, and a loyal partner.

You see, depression doesn’t take away the individual; it becomes part of the fabric within them. Engulfing them in insecurity, anger and shortsightedness. They cease to be themselves and instead become one with their depression.

It’s like living with someone who has no peripheral vision. Depression can’t see things for what they are; their focus is too narrow. Depression spends so much time worrying about their life, themselves, their family, that it doesn’t stop to appreciate what they have, how hard they’ve worked to get it. Depression hides itself behind minor obsessions, things that take its attention away without any real productivity. Depression will accuse you of ruining its fun for trying to redirect its attention back towards the things that matter.

Depression makes bad choices, lets other things fall by the wayside. Depression feels like there’s nothing it can do to solve problems because all of the problems are un-solvable. Depression is always overwhelmed and undercharged. Depression doesn’t help you when you really need it, because it can’t see how badly you need it.

Depression will fight about how tired they are, how much effort they’ve put in, to the point that when they DO put effort in, it never seems like enough. Depression will try and out-match you in everything you do, because depression can’t be wrong. Depression craves validation.

The depression I live with doesn’t want to get better, because depression doesn’t want to see the problems it knows it’s creating. Depression won’t medicate, because to medicate means to lose some of itself. Depression can’t see that by trying to hold on, it’s pushing the only thing that matters further and further away.

Depression finds its way into my head, too. I overextend myself to compensate and end up tired and frustrated, just like it wants. I snap too easily, just like it does. I don’t communicate effectively with depression because, really, who could?

In sickness and in health, I remind myself.

Today I stop letting a depression that isn’t even mine control my life. Today I stop living for depression and start living for me again. From now on I will offer depression a hand up, if it’s willing to take it, but I won’t shoulder the weight of it anymore.