Depression is where creativity goes to die. Not happiness. Most people make the mistake of thinking happiness is the opposite of depression; it isn’t. The opposite of depression is in fact vitality, and in turn creativity. The first time I got clinically depressed, I was 13 years old. Most people told me and still continue to tell me that I was too young to be depressed, because for some reason it’s okay to tell people about their own neuroses. But I was.
Everything was too much work. Everything took too much time. For a long time I simply thought that I would be like that for the rest of my life. There wasn’t even a glimpse of hope within me that suggested I could maybe get better. Also, for a long time I didn’t understand that what I was feeling wasn’t normal; I looked at the fact that we had very little money, we lived in a not so nice area, and I had few friends, and saw what many would consider a terrible life. So me feeling terrible, given the circumstances, seemed perfectly reasonable. It’s absurd that depression is considered a western, middle class disease. An interesting thing is that impoverished societies and people have every right to be depressed. If you’re rich and have a seemingly good life, yet you feel terrible, you’re more likely to think “this isn’t normal, maybe this can be treatable.” If you’re in poverty, you will feel terrible, and your circumstances will reflect that, so you’re less likely to think your dissatisfaction is treatable. There’s an epidemic of depression in poverty that is being ignored, untreated. And with the cuts the government have made to mental health services, this will only worsen.
Depression often manifests itself in strange and undetectable ways. A lot of the time, what depressives are experiencing is not illness but insight. For some reason, a common theme among depressives is to get really existential. I would think often about the inevitability of death, that nothing really mattered, how you can never truly have a completely honest relationship with another because we’re all trapped inside our own heads and bodies, and technically, all those things are true. One day, over a bowl of cereal, I was thinking about was how pointless my mere existence was, and then I thought to myself, “maybe you should finish breakfast first. Then you can think about death.” That was the first time I knew I was recovering. On good days, existential questions don’t distract me that much.
Depression affected my academic life and sent me off in a completely different direction to that I had planned for myself. At 11 I had dreams of being a physicist, an engineer, a chemist. But depression hit, my grades slipped, and that was no longer happening. I beat myself up about it for months and months. I so desperately wanted to be all these things; to be the smartest person in the room, to defy all expectations of someone from a poor estate. But at 13 I had to re-decide what I was going to do. It was a catch-22, because I suddenly had to rethink my future because I was depressed and knew it would stick around, but I didn’t care about my future because I was depressed.
As I grew older, I learned more about depression, and how it’s dealt with by different people. Suddenly, the phrase “choose happiness” riddled it’s way into the self-help books I read, and I ended up thinking my depression was my own fault; that somehow I’d caused my own depression by not choosing to be happy and not thinking enough happy thoughts. The logic kind of makes sense at a push, because a mentally well person can decide to be in a good mood if they try hard enough. But honestly, the idea that a person with a chemical imbalance in their brain can “choose happiness” is ridiculous. It ain’t that simple, to be frank. For me, happiness is something that happens as a side effect of doing the things that make me feel contented and energized. You can’t bottle it, or choose it on a morning. Well, I can’t anyway.
It took me years to separate my depression from myself, but also accept it as something I’m going to have to deal with for the rest of my life. My depression might be because of many things, and I’ll continue to work hard to uproot those things so I can not be so affected by them anymore, but for the time being, I’ll probably get depressed sometimes.
