When Depression Creeps Up On You

So here’s the thing about depression, you’ve been raised all your life thinking it was this state where people are always sad and crying.

Well, guess what? it’s not.

Depression is not balling your eyes out at 2 am, it’s waking up at 2 pm not wanting to get out of bed. It’s waking up for school and convincing yourself that you don’t have to, that it’s no big deal. It’s the weekend that everyone is so excited about but all you want to do is sleep it off.

Depression is feeling like a robot that’s been programmed to do things, you do things because you have to not because you want to, you go out with your friends to the bar and drink because that’s what everyone defines as fun, but you don’t enjoy a single second of it.

See, it’s not that you’re “sad”, it’s that you don’t have any emotions left in you.

It’s like all the life has been drained out of you. You’re a living emotionless person, no actually, you’re not living, you’re a surviving person, living day by day, pushing yourself out of bed, chewing some tasteless food, riding a bus while your mind is in some place else. It’s like you’re watching yourself live from another person’s perspective, you see what this person is doing but you just can’t feel what should normally be felt.

Depressed people don’t stay awake at night overthinking all the shitty things in their life. Depressed people sleep everything off because nothing matters to them, not a single thing in this meaningless word, they’re just passing time, day by day, week by week and month by month.

Depression is forgetting how genuine happiness felt like but also how heartbreaking sadness felt like.

I remember one time I was sitting with a friend of mine who had felt the same way, and he told me, “I want to go to a psychiatrist and let him ask me, how did that make you feel?” I never gave much thought to this particular conversation but then one day I was on a bus ride on a rainy day and I was looking through the big glass windows, I saw that we were passing by a park, I saw a lot of people there, just having fun. Two beautiful parents with their children, kids playing around in the playing area, some guy running around the track in a track suit and a beautiful couple. I started to look at it from a different perspective, I looked at the people and they looked genuinely happy, the parents were effortlessly laughing and I could see the love that they had for their children just by the way they were looking at them. The children were all playing together and I heard them screaming and laughing without a care in this world. The runner looked so devoted to what he was doing with an iPod in his hand and earphones in his ears and the couple were just sitting and talking.

Then it hit me, and it hit me hard, that here I was, just a distant observer of these people, thinking this day was just another ordinary day in the calendar when it could alter the way some people see the world, it could be an important date in someone’s life, it could mean the world to people, this day is a special day to someone somewhere.

I asked myself right then, “How does that make you feel?” I didn’t know the exact answer but I felt something, and before I knew it, the tears were flowing on my cheeks. I didn’t stop and I didn’t want to stop them. I let the tears flow because after a long time of nothing, I finally felt something.