Publications
Partners
I was angsty and "emo", pessimistic, self-involved, and generally awful, as teenagers often are.
Then, one day, my sister gave me some advice. She was much older than me, much more charismatic, and much more popular, and I was intensely jealous of the way the same people adored her when they didn’t like me so much.
She told me that she was optimistic, sometimes to a fault, and that people liked that. They didn’t like moodiness and cynicism and pessimism.
Her advice made sense to me, so I made the conscious choice to try be more optimistic and happier. Things undeniably improved for me from that day on, all because I changed my attitude.
For this reason, I became someone who was convinced that I had solved the puzzle that is a happy life. As far as I was concerned, happiness was a choice, because it had been one for me.
This made me incredibly dismissive of depression. Why couldn’t other people just make up their minds to be happy, like I had?
I grew to believe that depression was a subconscious choice that people make because it made them feel special to be "delicate". I dismissed people who suffered from depression as nothing more than attention seekers who never outgrew teenage moodiness.
And then, one day, I got depression.
It's called postnatal depression. If affects new mothers, and I was hit with it hard after my second baby. The doctors explained that, with hormones changing all over the place, I was probably suffering from a chemical imbalance. They explained that it was perfectly common and normal, and promised that it would be over fairly soon.
I felt like the entire world was hell.
Even now, I struggle to explain how empty, alone, and pointless I felt. It’s like that part of humans that tells us to keep going, to keep moving forward, and keep trying, and to stay alive, had just vanished. I couldn’t see the point of existence. I couldn’t see the point of anything.
Mothers with postnatal depression often harm their babies, so people would make excuses to be around me when I was with my baby a lot more than they had been after my first child.
Funnily enough, my baby was the only person in the world I cared about. Everyone else I hated, including myself. And I hated people who didn’t understand this, who thought that they were helping.
And I hated myself for feeling this way, for being so goddamn unreasonable. I hated myself for not being able to just choose happiness.
I was put on "happy pills", and my mother was advised to regulate how many of the pills I had access to, just in case I tried to kill myself. I still remember how strange that felt. I remember seeing how
scared the people around me were, because I wasn’t the person I had been - something had changed - so much that I couldn’t even be trusted with medicine. They weren’t scared of me, but they were terrified for me. And still I hated them, and hated myself, and hated existence.
Things did balance out for me in time, and I’ve never experienced depression again. I also would never want to.
It's hard to understand what depressed people are going through when you’ve never experienced depression yourself. I know this all too well. But please, try to understand:
Depression isn't feeling a bit sad or a bit moody. It isn’t logical or reasonable. It’s not something you can snap out of. Depression isn't a choice.
It's a very serious medical illness, and dismissing it as someone just "choosing to be sad" can cause very real harm.
Because here's something that someone should have said to younger me: If you can just choose to be happy, you’re damn lucky.
Not everyone has that luxury, and telling someone to just "snap out" of depression is about as effective and helpful as telling someone who’s lost a leg to just "walk it off".
Follow Laura on Twitter or visit her blog.
Follow Women24 on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
