For me, depression felt like things just stuck to me. Everything negative, from minor and petty things to real major life events. Every time something new would happen, it would get stuck to that pile of things and pull on all that negativity, waking it up again. Like if you’d forget you said you’d help me with something, it would bother me because you forgot, but it would also trigger all the other negative things I could think of about my history with you and me, and often with other unrelated people, making me feel like nobody cared about me, or that I was just a joke of afterthought to everyone in my life, even though it was nothing more than something just slipping your mind. So instead of just sayin, oh no problem, you were probably just busy and got disctracted, i’m glad you’re here now, it’d trigger vivid memories of like 100 bad things that happened to me all at once. It’s just impossible to function like that.
Almost immediately after I got on medicine that costs me less than Tylenol, all that stickiness was gone. Being able to separate my feelings and deal with them one at a time as they came in instead of trying to cope with a life’s worth of issues all at once was so life changing! It finally gave me time to resolve my feelings about those old events and to move on from them instead of dragging them with me everywhere I went.
When I feel really bad now, I feel that weight start to build and it tells me that I need to look inward more seriously again. I feel myself reach the limits of the medicine. I tried to up the dosage (with doctor’s permission!), but that made me too tired. I just have to pay attention and assert myself where I can with people causing me issues, and I need to make sure I’m having good times with people and activities I do like. It’s like watching your hunger now. You don’t want to let yourself starve, and you don’t want to get so hungry you pig out on a bunch of junk. I just need to be smart about my emotions. It’s way easier still than if I would not be on my medicine. It’s so scary to think that I could still be that old way, and if I ever forget to take my medicine I do feel it creeping in. There are a few downsides to meds for me, but I feel they are very minor compared to the depression.
