Depression Talk

When you have depression, it can be very hard to explain how you feel to someone who does not have depression. It’s like trying to talk to an alien from another planet. Depression affects all areas of your life, including the way you think, feel, make decisions and just about anything else. These feelings can be seemingly incomprehensible to someone who has no clue as to what depression feeels like. Even with all of those funky “Depression Hurts” advertisements from Cymbalta, many of the non-depressed still haven’t a clue.

So, if you’re dealing with someone who doesn’t know what you are going through (the non-depressed), you can print this post out and shove it under his or her nose.

Picture If you Will…

Imagine you are lockined in a pitch black closet and can’t find the door. Then, imagine that this house gets caught up in a F-5 tornado. So, depression feels like you are in a locked, pitch-dark closet caught inside of a tornado.

And you feel this way all of the time.

Get It Now?

When I was homeless in England, I had a lot of time to come up with metaphors to describe what deprssion feels like. Not all of the other homeless I met had depression. Many were addicts, which is not the same thing as depression. I remember one white-haired fellow pulling on his can of Special Brew who asked me skeptically, “So, wuzzit feel like to ‘ave depression, then?”

I told him the above description.

He nodded, blinked for a while and then said, “Wow. I had to go through twenty years and thousands of pounds worth of chemicals to get to feel like that. And you were born with it!”

Varying Degress

The tornado you’re in slows down every now and then when you have depression. Sometimes, it even stops and you finally get to see that there is a way out of the closet. But, eventually, you somehow seem to get back in that closet in the middle of Tornado Alley. It ’s the feeling of not being able to find a way out is what it’s like living with depression day in, day out.

Well, it’s not a perfect metaphor, but hopefully this will help those without depression understand what depression feels like.