The Hilarious World of Depression

by John Moe

I had emailed her but figured she wouldn’t read the email or remember it if she had because I’m dumb and worthless and everyone hates me. This didn’t make me sad; it’s the way I understood the world to be.

it—I just kept thinking about how nothingness, a nothingness in which I am not even aware of nothingness, would be sort of delicious.

What it really was, of course, was a mind that wanted to rest but kept whirring along and pushing me to dark places.

As if I could simply do that.

As if I chose this. As if I looked at the options available to me and they were clearly labeled “Perseverance” and “Freaking the Fuck Out All the Time” and calmly said, “Mmm, yes, I select option B.”

Depression does its damage and then it hides, covering its tracks, making you think that it is not an illness, that you’re just bad and weird.

Only by being useful or talented, and receiving external recognition, would I achieve personhood. I couldn’t imagine a world where I was a worthwhile person by dint of mere existence; I felt like I needed to earn it and prove it every day.

For saddies, encouragement is revelatory. Rather than making their resolve stronger, it will implant a resolve where none had been. “Because this person believes in me,” the saddie thinks, “and this person is not me, they may have a point.”

I knew that dying and leaving behind people who were gullible enough to care about me was a bad thing to do. I also knew more about me than anyone else did, so I knew how hollow and worthless I really was, and thus their sentimental mourning for me, if that even happened, would be misguided.

It wasn’t so much anguish and pain, just a cold knowledge of my uselessness.

“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.”

For me, there’s always the dull desire to not exist, but it’s not an impulse to do something about it at the moment.”

You know how when you get mad you get this warped idea that throwing something across the room will purge those feelings? And you know how that never ever works and you don’t feel better?

A depressed mind is pretty adept at buying into a distorted reality.

Depressed people have an urge to make good things into ugly messes to better match their state of mind.

And once that awful noise was taken away I became aware of how much of my life was spent just trying to exist.”

For a depressed person, there’s something reorienting about a crisis. It reminds you there’s a world outside your head. Instead of fretting over the future or stewing over the past, you have something new to put in the brain. When it’s something terrible or sad and you are still somehow persevering—waking up, making coffee, eating, going to work—it’s a sign that, corny as this may sound, life goes on. For a depressed person, the notion that life will go on is always up for debate, so when it does go on, even in the face of tragedy, it feels reassuring.

it’s just that the brain is too busy making sense of the current stimulus and making decisions around it to spend the usual time examining (and steadily eroding) itself.

When good things fall to pieces, it validates the depressed person’s mind. “See? Everything IS terrible. I was right all along!”

Saddies, on the other hand, have a tendency to seize upon any idle moment to leap into our own brains, use depression to beat ourselves up about the past, use anxiety to beat ourselves up about the future, and generally berate ourselves for sucking.

Depression looks for the most horrible option on the menu and selects that every time.

Getting better is not ridiculous, and using whatever means you can to get there isn’t ridiculous either.

Depressed people do this all the time. They take their fragile, underdeveloped selves and put them in what they hope will be a sturdier and more nurturing container.

It’s all a form of giving up on yourself and putting your identity, your self, in the hands of other people.

There’s a kind of facile response that normies have when they hear about saddies going to bed and staying there. The normies think that it’s about being bummed out or lazy. That may be a factor for some, but a much more common reason is that, again, we’re exhausted. Having a brain spinning like that, having a brain bottoming out like that, carrying around that psychic baggage all the time—it wears you out. The body might be expending very little actual energy, but the mind is running a marathon combined with an obstacle course. Are you depressed and find yourself tired all the time? That may be because you do a decathlon every day.

I didn’t want to die, but I wanted to take my brain out of my head for a while. Just store it in a jar for a few weeks and then put it back in after I’d rested.

Depression can’t be cured by positive life circumstances because depression is not a reaction to circumstances.

opening up about depression can feel like giving one more weapon to someone who you know can use it against you.