Summary

The author discusses the unpredictable nature of chronic depression, its triggers, and the strategies for managing its symptoms.

Abstract

The article delves into the author's personal experience with depression, emphasizing its sudden onset and the challenges of coping with it. Despite recent periods of feeling well, the author describes a sharp decline in mood, attributing it to the upcoming anniversary of a friend's death, the completion of a significant work project, and the approach of their birthday. The author acknowledges the benefits of self-care, therapy, and social support in mitigating depression's impact but also points out the limitations of these strategies. The piece underscores the importance of maintaining these efforts to prevent depression from worsening, even if a complete resolution of symptoms is not always possible.

Opinions

Depression can strike unexpectedly, significantly affecting one's emotional and mental state.
Self-care and social support are crucial in managing depression, but they may not always be sufficient.
The end of a significant project can be as stressful as the project itself, leaving a void that can contribute to feelings of depression.
Therapy and medication are helpful tools in managing depression, though immediate results should not be expected.
Anniversaries of traumatic events can trigger depression, requiring extra vigilance and coping strategies.
The author believes that while depression cannot always be prevented, its severity can be mitigated through proactive management.
Writing and engaging in hobbies can serve as therapeutic outlets

Sometimes, Depression Sneaks Up on You

It’s a mercurial bugger.

Photo by Kilimanjaro STUDIOz on Unsplash

Just a few weeks ago, I was feeling great. I told several people that lately, I’d been feeling better than I have in a long time. Life had been pretty good for a few weeks, and my mood was much lighter than the ball of stress I’d been in February.

Well, nothing good can last, as they say, and in the past week or so my mood has dropped precipitously. It’s been a weird drop, too — I went from feeling great to hanging from a very thin thread with very little in between. All of a sudden, anything remotely emotional makes me want to cry and I’m just not feeling very good emotionally or mentally.

This happens a lot to me and many people. Depression, particularly chronic depression, has a bad tendency to jump up at you out of nowhere and tackle you to the ground. You’ll go from walking on air to down in the dumps on the turn of a dime. It’s often unpredictable, and while there can be an explicit trigger, it is sometimes completely random.

There are things you can do to mitigate it, of course, but it can be challenging. There’s always your self-care to fall back on, and you can lean on your network to talk with about your depression symptoms. Those two things by themselves can help mitigate some of the worst of it.

However, depression is a fickle, mercurial bugger that can ooze itself around your attempts to fight it. Giving a friend a call to talk to can be a great way to help work through your feelings, but if they miss your call or take too long to answer your message, it can feel like they don’t want to talk to you. Suddenly, the friend you can always count on doesn’t want to waste their time with you and clearly hates you now, so obviously, they’ll cut off contact and stop being your friend. Rejection-sensitive dysphoria is a bitch.

Therapy can also help — standing appointments with a therapist can help you work through your feelings and develop coping skills. However, if your therapist isn’t immediately available or your appointment is a ways off, it can feel like you’re drowning while the rescue boat is right there, just out of reach.

Self-care is helpful, of course, but it can only do so much. Relaxing your body and mind can help in the short term, relieving your feelings of stress and depression, but once you get done with it, the feelings can flood back in. There are only so many bubble baths you can take and games you can play before you get bored, and then all the negative thoughts come flooding back. Sometimes they just kill your motivation for self-care altogether, which really sucks.

In my case, I can point to a few things that might be influencing my mood lately. We’re coming up on the first anniversary of my friend’s death, and that was very traumatic for me, so naturally, an anniversary like that is likely to trigger my depression.

I’ve also wrapped up a six-week project at work, which can be just as stressful as actually doing the project. Somehow, when you get done with something big and don’t have anything to fill that void, it can be weirdly draining. Your life, which revolved around one particular thing, now has a big hole where that thing was.

My birthday is also coming up, which is a bit weird for me in general. I tend to feel pressure to figure out what I want to do and what I want as a gift, which is hard for me because there isn’t much that I do want. It’s not that I’m getting older per se, it’s more that I don’t have any ideas for what the heck to do about it.

All of this, it seems, has congealed into a gross stress ball that is occupying my brain right now. The depression is eating me right now, and even though life is pretty good, my brain refuses to acknowledge it.

I’m doing what I can to mitigate this, but it’s only going so well. I’ve talked to my partner and a couple of friends, I’ve tried to work on my self-care and unwind after work, and I am anticipating my next therapy appointment soon. Hell, I’m writing about it, using my hobby as a catharsis to excise some of these feelings. Still, though, I can feel myself slowly spiraling downward, and there is only so much I can do to claw my way back up, even if just temporarily.

Ultimately, we all do what we can to mitigate our depression symptoms, but sometimes there isn’t much that you can actually do. I take my meds, I do my self-care, I talk to my friends and therapist, and I cope as best as I can, but the depression comes nonetheless. Thankfully, even though it will be a part of my life for the next few weeks or so, these things are helping keep it from getting too bad.

Yes, the meds, self-care, and talking about things only get you so far and can’t always stave it off, but they do help. If I didn’t do those things, I’d be much deeper into the depression than I am, and by keeping up with them, I can stop myself from falling to the bottom of the pit. Without these things, I’d be much worse than I am now and would get much worse than I probably will.

If you deal with regular depression, you are probably familiar with all of this and have developed your own methods to keep yourself from falling into the abyss. And, if you know someone — a friend, a family member, whoever — who deals with this, I hope this has given you some insight.

Depression is a beast that can be hard to deal with, and it isn’t always manageable, but it doesn’t have to destroy your life every time it comes around. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it shows up and wrecks everything, but other times you can keep it more or less managed, and those are the times that matter. I hope that you can manage your depression the next time it shows up, and if you’re dealing with it now, may you defeat your demons and get through the worst of it.

Be well out there.

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