Educate Yourself

I came across this quote on Tumblr  the other day and it spoke volumes to me. It's really hard to describe to people the obstacles I face on a daily basis; the constant struggle I endure with myself. I've tried to explain my feelings on this blog before, but I think this quote says it best. Please take the time to educate yourself on how depression affects those individuals suffering from it so you can better understand them.

"Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation. Depression is humiliating.

If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.

It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. Depression is humiliating.

No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged."

10 Ways to Feel Less Lonely

We’ve all experienced feelings of loneliness at one time or another, whether it be from boredom, moving to a new school and not knowing anyone or due to a variety of other changes within your life. Unfortunately, those of us dealing with depression feel alone on a regular basis. We could be in a room surrounded by all of our closest friends, laughing and having a good time or we could be having a quiet evening at home with our family, but despite being surrounded by people we love and people who love us, inside we feel empty, like we’re the only one in the room.

Despite these feelings, it is important to try and not let your loneliness define you, to not let it take over your life or keep you from having a good time. Instead of wallowing in your loneliness, allow yourself to appreciate your alone time. This is a good time to discover who you truly are, to find new passions, to work on a project that you keep putting off. Alone time doesn’t have to be lonely if you look at it in a positive way. Below are 10 tips of things you can do when you feel alone to help you centre yourself and calm your mind so you can appreciate the time you have to yourself.

1. Go for a walk in the woods. This allows you to escape the busyness and stress of daily life and to experience the world as it was truly meant to be before us humans destroyed most of its beauty. The fresh air and the sounds of nature are peaceful and refreshing. Reconnecting with the earth can ground you and make you feel a part of something special.

2. Spend some time in the sun. Sunlight is a natural treatment for depression. It lifts our spirits and helps us enjoy our day

3. Meditate. Meditation has been proven to relieve stress and help with depression. Set aside some time each day to sit in a comfortable spot, erase the thoughts from your mind, enjoy the pure silence and concentrate on your breathing. It takes some practice to do this successfully, but with time you will be calm, you will feel all your anxieties drift away and you will feel connected to yourself in a way that you have never experienced before.

4. Practice Yoga. Like meditation, yoga helps you to calm your mind, to be in control of your body and allows good energy to flow through your body while flushing out all the negative thoughts that are weighing you down. Exercise keeps you healthy, triggers your feel good hormones, and if you take yoga at a public class, you can meet lots of like minded people and hopefully develop some new friendships.

5. Write a journal. This is my go-to when I’m feeling lonely. I find that getting all my thoughts and emotions out of my head and onto paper really reduces my anxiety and allows me to process how I’m feeling in a more logical way.

6. Play with your pet. Being around animals has been proven to reduce stress and make us happier. Playing with a furry companion who will love you unconditionally will really give you a purpose and make you feel less lonely. If you don’t have a pet of your own, check out your local animal shelter and if you can, consider adopting one of the animals (they need our love and companionship just as much as we need theirs).

7. Watch TED Talks. There are literally hundreds of talks all filled with inspiration and creativity. There is truly something for everyone and I promise you you’ll feel more in touch with yourself and the rest of humanity after watching. Sometimes watching TED Talks is just what I need to inspire me to be the best me I can be and to give me the motivation to get off the couch and enjoy my day.

8. Read a book. If you enjoy reading then you don’t need me to explain how amazing it feels to get lost in a fictional world for a little while. More often than not I get so immersed in a book that I completely forget about the real world. The characters become my friends, the plot becomes my life, and for however long it takes me to finish the book, I’m truly not alone.

9. Pamper yourself. Appreciate your alone time and indulge in an at home spa day. Light a candle. Put on some relaxing music. Enjoy a soothing bath. Give yourself a hair treatment. Exfoliate your skin. Give yourself a facial. Paint your nails. Just love yourself.

10. Call your friends or family. Sometimes we just need to hear the voice of someone we love to calm us down and reminds us that we’re not alone in this world, that even though we may feel lonely, there’s people out there who truly care about us. Instead of picking up the phone, why not use Skype or Face Time? Seeing the person you’re talking to will give you a boost of happiness because instead of feeling like you’re just talking to a distant voice, you’ll feel like that person is really with you. 

My Experience: Part II - The Suffering That Depression Has Caused Me To Endure

It’s really hard to put into words how I feel when I’m depressed. There’s no words strong enough to do my feelings justice and if you’ve never experienced depression yourself, you can only try to imagine how terrible it really feels. No one can understand the true horror of depression unless they’ve felt it first-hand. If you’ve never been clinically depressed your body just isn’t programmed to feel such strong negative emotions, to hit a low that reaches deeper than any low you have ever experienced. Lucky you.

I have panic attacks, anxiety attacks, full on mental breakdowns that all occur just out of the blue. I can literally be perfectly happy and not have a worry in the world one minute and then all of a sudden this rush washes over me and I feel scared, although I don’t know of what, my mind is blank yet racing with thoughts at the same time, I forget everything I was doing, everything I should be doing, everything I am and I just become overwhelmed with negativity – it’s like I’m under water, drowning, being tossed around by a giant wave with no way of knowing when it’ll stop, if it’ll stop, if I’ll ever get the chance to come up for air. My chest feels tight, it’s hard to breath. I start shaking and crying, gasping and hyperventilating. I need to get somewhere safe immediately – my bed, the arms of my boyfriend, my mom or my sister. It goes on for hours like this. Every time I start to feel a little calmer and the tears have managed to stop flowing then another rush comes over me. There’s no trying to stop it, to get a hold of myself, my brain can’t even fathom how to go about doing that. All I have to do is wait; endure the pain of it all until it comes to its natural end. Needless to say, I feel off for the rest of the day. I can’t shake the feeling of what happened. I feel sad, down, lonely, tired. I just want to fall asleep and hope I sleep right through until the next day.

I cry a lot. I’ve heard that crying may mean you’re not dealing with depression but simply grief because as I explained in a previous post (Depression vs. Sadness), your mood produces emotional symptoms, whereas the symptoms of depression are more physical. But I’ve always been a very emotional person, I’ve always turned to crying as a way to release the feelings built up inside me and so I think my excessive crying now is due not to the temporary mood of grief, but to grieving for the loss of myself that depression has caused. I don’t recognize myself any more, and sometimes no matter how hard I try, I can’t get back to the way I used to be and this scares me. So whenever people ask me how I’m doing, whenever I’m forced to talk about my depression, I get a lump in my throat and the tears start swelling up behind my eyes and no matter how hard I try, it eventually becomes too much and I break down crying.

Sometimes I’ll be sitting by myself and I just start crying out of nowhere. All of a sudden this feeling of frustration over takes me and I can’t escape it. I bring my knees to my chest, put my forehead on my knees, and grab at my hair with both hands, pulling on my hair because I feel so overwhelmed, so frustrated, so broken.

I get irritated a lot and lose my temper. When people do things that I used to find funny and playful, I now have no patience for them and they cause me to be annoyed. The littlest things set me off and I argue a lot more than I used to. I also can’t concentrate – my mind either feels overwhelmed and jumps from one idea to the next, making it impossible for me to make up my mind or I stare blankly ahead while my mind is off in la-la land, thinking of absolutely nothing, just wasting time away.

Most of the time I have zero motivation to do anything. There’s lots of things I’d like to do, and often I’ll sit there staring at things, willing myself to just pick them up and start doing something, but I just can’t. There’s no explanation for it. There’s just this force within me that is holding me back. It’s terrible, because I’m so bored, but no matter how strong the boredom, I can’t bring myself to do anything. Sometimes I can’t even read or watch TV or do mindless tasks. I just sit there, staring off in the distance. Sometimes I go days without showering because it just seems like such a huge chore. I love to cook but I barely eat decent meals anymore because I just don’t feel like making them. I live for nature and the outdoors but most of the time I can’t bring myself to get dressed let alone leave the house, even to just go sit in my back yard for a bit. It takes me hours to fall asleep at night, usually I’m not asleep until 4am and then I never want to wake up and get out of bed in the morning. By the time I’m up it’s almost lunch time and I’ve wasted half my day just lying in bed. I used to be extremely active (sports, gym, yoga, zumba) but now I do none of that; it’s just too much effort. I’ve become lazy, but not a kind of laziness I can control. It’s not like I don’t want to do these things and rather sit around doing nothing, definitely not! I would love to be my active self again, but I just can’t. Again, there’s that imaginary force holding me back.

Most days I get out of bed and go sit in my recliner, I drink a tea and spend the whole day reading. I only get up to go to the bathroom, snack on something that doesn’t require time to make or to refill my tea. I feel like each day just blends right into the next one, it’s all a blur. My life is passing me by. Days have turned into weeks, into months and now into years of me doing absolutely nothing with my life. It saddens me that I’m missing out on so much, that I’m missing out on being a regular 24 year old girl, that I can’t hold on to a job and don’t even have enough money to live off of let alone go out and have a good time with my friends doing all the activities I dream of one day doing again. I try to get things done each day to change my situation, even if just a little, but it’s terribly hard to notice any progress. I’m determined to turn all this around and be my happy self again but sometimes I just feel stuck. 

Feelings You May Experience If You're Dealing With Depression

Below is a list I created for myself of how I feel on a regular basis. I experience most of these feelings daily, although the severity of the feelings varies from day-to-day. I found it helpful to write all my feelings down – getting everything out of my head and on to paper made me feel less overwhelmed. It’s also great to be able to look at this list from time to time and remind myself that even though I’m struggling, there’s nothing wrong with that, the feelings I’m experiencing are normal for the situation I’m in, and I think recognizing that is an important step in recovery.

I encourage you to make your own list to help yourself better understand the different sensations your body is dealing with. For some of you, creating this list may be easy. Personally, I struggled with it because it was hard for me to accept that this is what I was going through (normally I’d just sweep all my emotions under a rug and forget about them) so this was definitely a good reflection exercise for me. Just remember that there may be things on my list that don’t apply to you and likewise you may be dealing with certain feelings that I haven’t experienced. That’s okay. We’re individuals and that means even though we’re in the same situation we may have slightly different experiences, that’s what makes me, me and you, you. We’re all unique, and you should be proud of who you are.

How I Feel (in no particular order)

• Anxious
• Stressed
• Sore (all my muscles feel heavy and are in physical pain)
• Sad
• Down
• Lonely / alone (even though I know I’m not)
• Like no one understands (even though I know that’s not true)
• Irritable
• Upset
• Indecisive
• Unable to concentrate / distracted
• Like I’m letting people down who are depending on me
• Guilty
• Depressed
• Nervous
• Tired / exhausted
• Burned out
• Unconfident
• Not like myself
• Confused
• Lazy / lethargic
• Overwhelmed
• Unable to sleep at night but then can’t wake up in the mornings
• Restless
• Shy / timid / soft spoken
• Vulnerable
• Easily frustrated
• Scared of conflict
• Emotionally unstable
• Scared
• Lost
• Like my mind is fighting against me every step of the way
• Angry (at other people and at the fact that I struggle so hard at everyday tasks that come so easily to others)
• Trapped