How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

by J.S. Park

I fight back both tears and laughter, and I tell myself, Everything's fine, everything's fine, a cognitive trick to pull myself out of the falling, but nothing is fine, nothing is fine. There's nothing I can do.

I'm someone else's ghost in someone else's body. I wish I could say it gets easier each time, but I never know how long it's going to be. I never know when the colors will come back. I never know if this will be the one that wins.

The thing is, when I'm hit with depression, I already know what to do. I know I have to fight for air. I know I have to crawl for every inch of territory that's stolen. I know I cannot make decisions unless I talk with someone first. I must reach for my phone. I must reach for every scrap of surface to escape this tunnel. I must remind myself that there's so much worse in the world, and that the war inside cannot compare. I know. None of this makes the fog any easier. By the tiniest shred of sight, I must crawl.

Describing depression, however, is like relaying someone else's dream with someone else's tongue.

It feels like you're constantly drowning but you just won't die.

Spiraling circles of powerlessness. You think something can change, and right when you think it will, you turn around and realize you're headed right back to where you came from.

In depression you become, in your head, two-dimensional—like a drawing rather than a living, breathing creature. You cannot conjure your actual personality, which you can remember only vaguely

"I feel this way all the time. A sort of hum underneath everything. But it's not a feeling. There's no feeling. It's a constant nothing."

Can you just sit here with me, without saying a single word—and let me be depressed?

I need you, and you being here's not nothing.

In Scotland, she kept saying, we help those who cannot help themselves.

there's a link between trauma and the shape of a depressed person's brain. There's

Preparation, really, is half the battle.

he was using his depression as a catalyst for his creativity,

quickly learned that no matter how comprehensive, articulate, or scientific the book was, it was never going to be enough for every person who suffers from depression.