This one’s hard to spot, an elusive breed by nature. Some days, they are the loudest, funniest in the room; other days they’re hiding in the corner waiting for the chance to make an exit. Whoever they are that day, their depression is clinging to them, pulling them down deeper.
Everyone has faced a period of depression, a few longer than others, but for some, it’s never ending. The burden, the anxiety, and the sadness all enveloping and pushing down like a weight on their chest. It forces them under the water where all that can be done is to grasp for the things that will prevent drowning under the pressure of their own seemingly normal life.
Depression is suffocating and causes a person to shut down. Those close to you will tell you to “think happy thoughts” or ask, “what do you have to be depressed about? You have so much good in your life,” but they can’t understand that depression isn’t one bad day; it’s a bad week or bad month all packed into that one bad day.
Not everyone looks like the poster child for depression. Some are executive members of their sorority or fraternity with a full ride to their first choice college, with a loving significant other and a family that has always been supportive in any way possible. That doesn’t make that person’s pain any less meaningful. It doesn’t mean that it didn’t take them an extra hour in the morning to convince themselves to get out of bed, or that that person doesn’t believe even on their best day that nothing went right.
It’s hard to understand how the person that has it all together on paper could ever possibly feel like collapsing on the inside. No one wants to be the person who can’t remember the last time they felt happy or got out of bed in the morning by choice instead of obligation. No one wants to feel like at any moment something insignificant could cause a spiral into completely irrational rage, or be the one that always has something negative to say. No one would choose to be depressed.
Even if you do venture out with your friends, sitting there with them, you aren’t really there. You are physically, but the rest of you watches like a stranger, uninvolved, watching a live replay of your life, an ever-present disconnect between you and reality. It’s exhausting, but you crave the presence of others, even if you spend the whole time together wondering if they even really want to be there with you.
Regardless of whether or not that person spends the entire time questioning and feeling anxious, that one text asking to do something or just saying “Hey, you’re great,” makes it that much easier for that person to persevere through the day. It’s people that do those things that make it easier to continue, make it easier to remember the good. You never know what battles someone is fighting; your words can make all the difference.
