Looking back I know I’ve been dealing with depression since at least my thirteenth Christmas, a day when I cried myself to sleep in a haze of sadness that descended from nowhere. I loved Christmas; nothing had occurred to disappoint me; there was no reason at all for the despair that engulfed me. There were more days like that to come. 

I remember a year and a half into my time at university (pertinently, just after Christmas vacation had ended), running upstairs to the apartment where my friends lived and saying, “I’m so homesick I can’t stand it!” And those wonderful young women, who had travelled halfway across the world to study in a foreign language, culture and climate, put their arms around me and mothered me like they understood. I suppose they did.

A year and a half after that, I called my mom and confessed, “I stayed in bed and cried for hours yesterday.” She responded bracingly, “And if you only do that once in your life, you’ll be very lucky.” I wasn’t destined to be that lucky.

But those days were rare. Usually my depression manifested itself in quieter ways: a deep-set belief that I could never do enough or be enough, a habit of burying myself in daydreams for hours on end, a state of constant obsession and heartbreak over one boy or another (most of whom barely knew I existed.) I didn’t call it depression back then. I didn’t know there was an “it” to be named. It’s hard to recognize such a condition exists when it’s always there. It was who I was; it was what the world was.

That changed, and my life began to change when a dear friend talked me into talking to my bishop (the ecclesiastical leader of my congregation), who talked me into seeing a counsellor. Twenty minutes into our first session, he told me, “You have depression.” That was the beginning of a whole new understanding of myself and my environment. My persistent unhappiness wasn’t an inescapable part of my identity; life didn’t have to be uniformly miserable; this was an illness and it had a name. 

What is depression? It is an illness, not an identity.

To be honest - and this is my own experience, not a prescription for anyone else - I didn’t completely grasp that truth for a couple of decades, until my doctor and I found a regimen of medication that effectively balanced my messed-up biochemistry. With that in order, and the right emotional support and lifestyle choices, I discovered for the first time what it felt like to be free of depression. 

Unfortunately, that wasn’t a happily-ever-after ending. It appears that depression is going to be a lifelong condition for me, albeit a manageable one. Most mornings, I wake up knowing, “There’s nothing this day can throw my way, that me and God and forty milligrams of Prozac can’t handle.” But from time to time, life throws me a really nasty stink bomb or I start to neglect my basic needs, and that cloud drifts back. The difference now - and it really helps - is that I know the difference. I can fairly precisely delineate “this is me” and “this is the real world” from “this is depression.” 

Although they are rarer than they were in my early forties, I still have occasional days when I just can’t drag myself out of bed; there are still moments when I know that if I don’t get myself away from all these people and laughter and conversation, I am going to disintegrate; but now, I can say to myself and my loved ones, “I’m having trouble with my depression today,” just like another person might say, “My arthritis is acting up.” It still hurts (does it ever!), but it’s just a thing I’ve got to grapple with for a while. It isn’t an inescapable part of myself.

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