In today’s world, stigma makes many people believe that those of us who live with depression are weaker or more vulnerable, and that we cannot face situations in the same way as someone who does not have it. However, I often wonder if those people have ever had the opportunity to truly reflect on what it means to live with depression: what it feels like and how it is faced.
In my experience, depression changes over time and often develops gradually, from less intense to more severe stages. Many times, it can take years to realize that we have depression or that someone close to us may be experiencing it. At first, reaching a diagnosis can be very difficult: many of us have gone through different areas of physical medicine, mistakenly thinking that we have anemia because we feel weak, tired, and without energy. Because we do not give enough importance to mental health, we often assume that everything happening to us is physical. This also happens because we do not know that an illness can begin emotionally before becoming physical: the relationship between both is very close and can work like cause and effect, since many times a mental health problem can end up manifesting itself in the body.
Living with depression does not mean simply being sad, because sadness is a feeling that every human being experiences at some point in life. A person can be smiling 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and still be experiencing depression. The struggle is not with the world or with the people around us; the struggle is always internal. There are dark days (those in which depression feels more intense), when you do not want light, you do not want people, you do not want company, you do not want food, and everything seems to have no purpose. You cannot find meaning in anything, not even in the good things that may be happening to you at that moment. Many people wonder: if everything is going well, why do they feel this way?
For those of us who live with depression, it is normal to have dark days when we cannot get out of bed. And it is not a matter of willpower, because we want to, but sometimes we truly cannot get out of bed, and we choose to stay there because, despite everything, it is the place where we can feel the most comfortable.
As if this were not enough, anxiety can also appear. That difficulty breathing, a sudden outbreak inside without a clear reason, an uncontrollable trembling: it is fear, worry, and distress. When you do not understand your depression, all of this appears and you also have to fight against it. When you cannot, frustration appears and everything becomes even harder inside you. Your brain does not stop telling you things that make you feel increasingly desperate, bringing you down and leaving you with less strength to continue fighting. Everything becomes an internal battle, a fight between yourself and yourself, and you do not know who will win because, in the end, it is the same person who can give up and decide not to continue the fight.
This fight, for me, is not a sign of weakness, but of courage. I do not believe that a “weak” person could pretend that everything is fine on the outside while drowning on the inside. Let us not make a mistake: a person with depression is strong, because they can smile as if they were not living through an internal battle day after day.
#EveryoneForMentalHealth
