This Is What I Wish I Could Tell My Depression

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First off, how dare you rob me of what are supposed to be the best years of my life? You ruined the last few of my teenage years and you’re now ruining my twenties too. Please, stop robbing me of my youth, stop robbing me of the young and carefree person that I want to be. Let me go out to parties and bars. Let me stay out way too late and sleep in way too long the next morning.

Let me go on spontaneous adventures with my friends and make plenty of mistakes as well as plenty of memories. Stop suppressing the twenty-two-year-old woman that I dream of being. I’m not going to be in my twenties forever and so far, you are ensuring that they are the worst years of my life. I thought they were supposed to be the best. I won’t ever be this young again. Please stop robbing me of these years. It isn’t fair.

Second, stop ruining my friendships and relationships with people.
I understand that maybe you want to spend more time with me than I want to spend with you, but please don’t be selfish. Don’t make me stay home when friends invite me out to do things. I don’t care if you tell me that it’s what’s best for me ‘in the moment’ and that ‘tomorrow, you’ll let me socialize’ because every day is the exact same, no matter what you say the night before.

Thankfully, I have people in my life who are stronger than you and who care more about me than you do, and who, because of that, are willing to stand by me regardless of the hold you have on me. But I love my friends with all my heart, they keep me going, they keep me alive. They make me laugh and smile. They show me glimpses of a life without you. But then every time I come home, you’re right there waiting for me, and it’s as if I never left. And you’ll punish me for going out that one night and make me stay home for the next week to follow. Depression, please stop preventing me from socializing.

You exhaust me so much that by the time I get home from work at the end of the day, I don’t have any energy to fight you off, let alone any energy to actually go out and be a functioning human being. So I don’t. I stay home, by myself, and close myself in, isolating myself from everyone because contact with the outside world makes me so incredibly anxious and exhausted that I lose the ability to function. This is one of the ways that you bring Anxiety into our relationship Depression. You make me dread socializing and then you bring Anxiety in to make me feel worse. Sometimes, you and Anxiety work so well together that I have to turn my phone off and hide it in another room just to make it through the day.

Moving on. In the same broad category of friends, you have turned away any chance of me being with someone who makes me happy and if I have gotten so far as to actually get involved with someone, you are very quick to ruin that for me. You are immensely unappealing luggage to carry around with me and quite frankly, people don’t want to have to shoulder the burden of you, so they avoid me all together. The fact that you follow me everywhere has ended relationships and turned people away because you are just too much for people to handle.

You make it so damn hard for me to meet, and stay with, someone.
Again, are you just jealous that I spend time with people other than you? Do you hang around me all the time just because you feel like being selfish? Stop ruining relationships. Stop ruining love that comes into my life. It makes me feel worse than I already do. I don’t appreciate you coming into relationships and being a burden to the person I’m with. It’s not very respectful of you to put yourself in front of me when I’m hitting things off with someone. Am I not allowed to be happy? Is that what it is?

Of course it is. Because if I was happy, then you wouldn’t exist.

You’ve also taken over all the hobbies I used to have and all the things I used to enjoy. I used to love to read and play the piano and make things with my own two hands. I used to love spending time with my friends and playing the trumpet or the viola or playing board games with the family. I used to love going on random adventures and spending time outside.

I used to love travelling. I used to love a whole bunch of things that I don’t even remember anymore. You’ve taken all of these passions for yourself.
That’s not fair. They’re not yours. Granted, I still enjoy watching Netflix. And I still love playing with my puppy. But sometimes, even those things aren’t appealing to me. You’ve taken every pleasure I had and you’re keeping them to yourself.

You’ve made my grades in school suffer, you’ve added things to my face and my body that make it so that every time I look in the mirror, all I can see are physical manifestations of you. You’ve made me dependent on very strong anti-psychotics and that’s terrifying. They have awful side effects, such as immense thirst and weight gain, and I’ll probably be on them for the rest of my life. They have made me so numb that I can’t feel anything. Yes, it’s good that I can’t feel as sad, but it’s very bad that also can’t feel any happiness or excitement or pleasure that I might have before them.

Most of all Depression, you make me isolate myself. You make me feel as though I’m not worthwhile enough for anyone’s company or attention. You make me feel as though the only person in the world who cares about me, is me. And I’ve come to believe you.

I spend the majority of my life stuck inside my own head because you have made me ashamed and embarrassed of you. You have made me feel as though I am less of a human being. You have made me feel inferior and worthless. You make me look at every other person and think ‘how on earth can I compete with them?’. Depression, you have made me believe that I am the lowest of the low. And because of this, you isolate me, hide me away from anyone but yourself. It isn’t fair.

All in all Depression, you need to fuck off. Please.
You’re robbing me of my youth and of my freedom. You’re taking away my friends and any potential romance. You’re ruining friendships and making me isolate myself. You make me feel like there is nothing in the world that is good and that there is nothing to live for. You make me feel worthless and you have given me incredibly low self-esteem. You make me so exhausted every single day that the most I can do is lie down and sleep. You make me want the day to be over before it has even begun. What kind of life is that to live?

I’m wasting my life because of you. You are making me waste my precious time here living and that makes me so mad. I fight with you every single moment of the day and we get nowhere because as much as there’ll be moments where I think I’m winning, you slip an argument in and you win and take control of me. You need to stop. I don’t want to waste my life waiting until the end of the day when I can go to sleep. I don’t want to spend my time blowing off my friends because I’m too exhausted or anxious to socialize. I don’t want to be alone all my life because you have chosen to turn every guy away from me. I don’t want to be under your control.

You have sucked all the happiness and pleasure and joy and excitement out of everything because that’s what you feed on. Your food is the happy stuff, the exciting stuff, the joyous stuff, the pleasant stuff. You need to consume all that good, wonderful stuff in order to survive. But I need all that stuff in order to survive too.

If I’m happy, you don’t survive. And if you’re happy, I don’t survive. I’ve been fighting and I’m going to keep fighting, mark my words. Only one of us wins. Only one of us gets control. And I’m begging, please let it be me.