How Would You Describe How Depression Feels?

[Helliepig]

PS "depression" can be desolate hurt, rage at abandonment, terror and aloneness, deep hopelessness and warm swollen tears that can never be shed. It can be the dreadful long existence of a child waiting for someone to come, "love lost", forever in nothing. It can be any number of these things and more, mixed up in an individual concoction, that is your personal tragedy, your personal grief. It can be different between men and women and between women and women and between depression and PTSD and between depression of PTSD because our wounds and traumas and tragedies were unique..

It's a bit like taking a palate of deep frightening colours and mixing them up- everyone's streaks and patterns will be different. Some might have a unified colour, others unmixed... some with bigger splodges of paint than others. Some with one layer of paint, others with new layers inflicted over and over....

The secret to understanding is in your own history, your own trauma, your own pain. Then the colours of your symptoms give way and you start to see the colours and brush strokes that started it all off..

 

[DharmaGirl]

Depression for me is the black hole. I can't see outside it, the is only the black and pain. The only way out is to kill myself. That is the worst for me. I have found ways of keeping myself out of the hole now so I am safe.

 

[Girl3]

Over the decades my depression has taken different forms - but it mostly is numbness: a complete inability to feel anything. And because of my OCD-beaten into me-you-must-be-productive-or-die personality - I have over the years just woken up and decided it was the day to die. Or the night. And because I was never clever enough to go far, far away from my friends to commit these acts, I managed to survive.

Now I try to live for the sake of my daughter and I do it like I brush/floss my teeth: I may not feel like it, I may not enjoy it, but I do it anyway because I should.

The depression is always there however, just as is, the anger.

The part of the depression that is sooooo depressing is that the people who know you have it say things like " you are so lucky to be alive", "tomorrow will be a better day", "thank God you have all you have". Yep - I agree I am lucky to be alive. Tomorrow is not always a better day - in fact sometimes it is worse. And God is at best disinterested and while I do believe in Him, and believe in an afterlife, I do not feel that I need to thank Him for being raped or beaten or tortured, since I don't think He had anything to do with it.

 

[^^FlyingSolo^^]

It feels like quick sand under your feet. Outdoors far from houses and people. No one around. You scream but no one hears you. You KNOW nobody can hear you. You feel like you're going to die. You feel like your life is over as you keep sinking deeper. But you don't die just yet, you just stay stuck in the quicksand and you can't get out no matter how hard you try. The more you try the deeper you sink. So you stay put in the thick quicksand, and darkness of the night soon comes. You're still there stuck. You wait for daylight to come, but the universe is no longer the same. From this point forward it remains dark, no dawn, no sunlight, just horror, your stuck in the quicksand, and you can't move in the dark. The universe has flipped up side down and this is your new existence. Pure terror, waiting for death, in the dark, by yourself, nobody is looking for you, because you have nobody. Death awaits.

 

[Deleted member 14359]

Depression for me feels like my sole has had surgery and is in recovery. The desire to get up in a morning... is gone, the need to have fun...is gone, the feeling of love, for anone and anything...has gone. Feeling that I am in another world that sees a different me that only I can understand which leads to the feeling of absoute loneliness. Depending on the day, depression can come with or without tears.

Eitherway, hate it, don't get too much of it. Have a son to drag me out of bed in a morning...scared he won't be enough one day:cry:

 

[NewDay770]

Depression, I know this feeling very well. When I am depressed all I want to do is to isolate myself and sleep. It feels like it's the end of the world and there's nothing worth living. I tend to have a lot of suicidal thoughts. I feel abandoned and invisible. I try to avoid everything and avoid life, I do that by sleeping. Sleeping becomes my escape from life.

 

[Deleted member 14359]

Sleeping becomes my escape from life.

I do that when I am depressed, the trouble for me now that I have PTSD is I have nightmares so the ability to escape has gone. Sometimes it stops me from trying to just give up and go to bed, other times I just end up mulling about the house because sleeping is too scary. Need an equilibrium...please!

 

[Lilly]

For me, when the depression is bad, it feels like all the color and flavor has drained out of the world. Nothing interests me. Nothing tastes good. All I want to do is sleep.