You Can be Depressed Without Being Sad
Depression is a condition and happiness is a feeling they aren’t mutually exclusive.
Ever since I was 16 years old, I have carried around a diagnosis of clinical depression. That doesn’t mean that I am sad and crying all the time.
You are neurotic and depressed, it doesn’t mean that you are sad. ~Everclear
When you live with depression every day, sometimes you are drowning in it. Other times, it is just this vague feeling of sadness and tiredness that swims around the edges of your life. At our best moments, we only feel that sadness when we actually pause to think about it.
Depression doesn’t need to be a death sentence, although sometimes it feels like you are dead inside even though you are still alive.
You can get used to living with depression. I have. It’s something about myself that I have come to accept.
I used to think that “getting well” would mean that I would be healthy like normal people, that I wouldn’t feel depressed anymore. Now that I have been in therapy for a while though, I have come to realize that getting well is more about understanding and managing my symptoms, and taking better care of myself on my down days.
I am never going to stop being depressed. There is a chemical imbalance in my brain chemistry somewhere that is never going to go away. I have a history of trauma that I can’t erase. I accept that now. I live with that every day. I have stopped being angry and upset that I’m not a “normal” person with a normal brain.
Instead, getting well is about learning to live a full life in spite of my depression, in spite of my scars. I can be depressed and still be happy.
Am I as happy as normal people? I don’t think I will ever have an answer to that. In one of the happiest times of my life, I was in college studying psychology. I took the Beck Depression Inventory as part of one of my classes. On a scale of 1–10, I scored a 4. That means I was still mildly depressed even though I felt like I was happy.
Now, I am learning to define happiness on my own terms instead. I’m not using Likert Scale to determine if my feelings are “good” or “normal.” I am instead looking at all the beauty of life around me and finding love, gratitude and peace.
Coping Skills
One of the best coping skills for depression is a treatment called Behavioral Activation. If you boil it down, Behavioral Activation is basically just doing the things you need to do even if you don’t feel like it.
According to Medical News Today, One of the main ways people use behavioral activation is to increase pleasurable feelings and create a sense of meaning.
For example, a person who usually loves gardening may struggle with motivation when they have a depressive episode. This may mean that they stop gardening entirely. Doing this may reinforce the feeling that things are hopeless or deprive them of an activity that makes them feel good about themselves.
I’m not a gardener but instead I love music, yoga, writing and being a mom. Whatever it is you love, do more of that, and you are going to feel better.
Some days I wake up feeling exhausted and I don’t feel like doing yoga. I do it anyway. Every day. By the end of my practice, I end up feeling energized, peaceful, and ready to start my day’s other activities.
Even if you do tasks that you don’t find interesting, but that need to be done, you still have a chance to feel better. This can be as simple as getting out of bed and taking a shower if you are in a badly depressive episode. Or, it can be doing things like taking your car to get the tires rotated, cleaning up the house, paying bills, doing work, or anything else that needs to get done on a day-to-day basis.
Since I have a psychology degree, I have been forcing myself into behavioral activation for years. Most of the time it makes me feel better, at least because I have a sense of having a sense of accomplishment.
Behavioral Activation makes me appear normal and motivated, even when I’m, not feeling it on the inside. The days that the feeling doesn’t change inside me, I still feel lonely and tired, but most of the time I start to feel better as I carry out my morning routine.
Finding Happiness
Happiness is a feeling, it is transitory and fleeting for all of us.
Feeling happiness has never been my goal as someone with depression, it has been finding peace. Peace lasts. I am now creating a life that is fulfilling and meaningful. I do things that mesh with my values, I help people, I have love in my life.
Still, quite a bit of the time I am happy. For me, happiness comes from mindfulness. When I am fully present with what I am doing, instead of dwelling on my feelings about myself and about the past, it allows me to be happy and at peace.
Happiness comes from being fully present with my kids, from a job well done at work, and from pursuing my hobbies and interests.
Conclusion
Depression doesn’t have to be a death sentence. You can learn to manage your depression instead of being constantly caught up in it. The more you live a full life full of purpose, the more the depression slides farther and farther to the edges of your mind.
I haven’t conquered depression. I will never conquer depression. But every day that I refuse to let it conquer me is a win.
Let me know in the comments if you have depression too, how you cope with it, and if there are other mental health topics that you would like me to write about in the future.