What Depression Really Looks Like

People who have never been depressed like to call suicide "a permanent solution to a temporary problem." What they don't understand is that it doesn't feel temporary while you're living it. It feels like it will never stop. 

Steven Fry says the depressed "get overwhelmed by the monstrosity of being" and looking into "a futureless future." He is exactly right.

You feel so remarkably pointless, like the world would be wholly unchanged without you in it. It is not a better place for having you in it and might be improved without you. 

Would anything be different today if you didn't get out of bed? Would any major crisis happen if you failed to leave the house? Would there be any consequences at all?

You seriously doubt that many people would miss you. After 6 months, you assume most everyone would be fine.   You do not doubt how replaceable you'd be. Frankly, you think some people might be happy to be rid of you.

You don't understand why these thoughts aren't normal.

The 'futureless future' is just a continuation of the existence that brought you to this dark place. You are incapable of imagining any improvement to your situation. It is almost literally more than your mind can fathom.

You just want to curl into a ball of misery and be left alone, hoping it goes away. Sometimes, you even enjoy the misery at its worst because at least it means you're feeling something. It's a change of pace from the numb exhaustion of pretending to be OK.

You can even be OK, at least for a while. You can smile, you can laugh, you can enjoy things but depending on how close you are to the edge, it doesn't take much for it to all disappear.

Nobody likes dealing with a depressed person. Talking to us about why, on a global level, our problems aren't that bad doesn't register anything but guilt. If you can't talk away cancer, why should you be able to talk away a chemical imbalance that takes away our ability to feel joy?

The most isolating feeling is when your friends are right there and none of them have a clue how much you're drowning in this. You pull yourself together because you don't know how to explain this feeling to people who have so little wrong in their lives, let alone in their own brains.

Telling them how you really feel runs the risk of finding out a truth you might not want to know: when your going gets tough, they will be the first to get going. 

You don't trust most of the people in your life to hear any for help as anything more than a shout in the void. Because the friends who do care can't make you feel better, eventually you start to make your friends feel pointless. You stop reaching out to them so at least you can pretend it's your choice when your alone. 

I've had some version of this existing within me my entire life, including childhood. It's severity fluctuates but it has never been completely gone. 

Destructive or harmful things are appealing to me more than ever. The people I want to talk to about these desires is the smallest it's ever been. 

I think the moment that scared me the most was when I had a dream where I took an entire bottle of prescription antidepressants with the intention of ending my own life. According to the Internet, killing yourself in a dream means a desperate desire to escape your waking life. Where do you escape when you have no where to go and the thing you're trying to escape is your own life, your own brain?