The Hilarious World of Depression

Depression is good at making you think it’s not even there and that you are the problem. Depression wants you to think you made a choice to be this way.

What do you have to be stressed about?” the normies might have said, if I ever talked about these things with normal people. “You have a family, a house, a car, a good job. Just deal with it!” 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.

Trauma occurs when something happens that’s too horrible for your brain to deal with, so you just store it away. Over time, the horrible thing, which is still there, starts coming out in a variety of ugly ways, causing mental problems that you don’t even associate with the trauma because it happened so long ago.

Here’s the weird part: even when I was in the darkest and most despairing times of my depression, I still found depression funny. It was funny to me that the illness distorted my view of the real world like a funhouse mirror. It was funny that I could be immobilized by something that had no basis in a broken bone or bacteria or any tangible factor. And when other people, especially comedians and writers, shared their experiences with depression and those experiences were resonant with my own, I could laugh because we were all getting fooled together. I laughed in the same way an audience laughs at a particularly good trick pulled off by a magician. “We’ve all been deceived, but we don’t know how!

Depression steals your ability to feel happy and proud even at the moments you should be happiest and proudest.

I suspect that people with depression are fixated on the possibility of ambition being rewarded with happiness. Probably more than most people are. That’s because ambition about the future is a way of avoiding looking at a past that’s often pretty bleak or a future that is terrifying. This isn’t to say that getting a better job or a pile of money can’t be really great. They often are. Achievements or windfalls can often wipe out a particular cause of worry or dread, maybe even wipe out that worry forever. But then you get used to that new version of normal, the novelty wears off, and you’re left with the same brain you’ve always had, and that’s when depression emerges from dormancy.

Only decades later would it dawn on me that normal people who never deal with depression have a sense of self-worth automatically. Just by being a person on the earth, they feel themselves worthy of respect and love and all that other cool stuff.

If more people understand the reality of mental illness and get disabused of the Hollywood myths about it, the stigma about getting help will diminish, and then we’ll live in a healthier society.

Depression lies,” said Jenny Lawson . “Because every single time, it says, ‘You’ll never come out of this again. You are absolutely worthless, your family is better off without you.’ And then I remind myself depression lies. Those things are lies.

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. Don’t worry, this feeling went away after only several decades.

Talking about depression is great and healthy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not exhausting.

Comedy, much of the time, is built on disorder. Comedy is intoxicating to a young mind in distress. You see these famous people pointing out the ridiculousness of a world that you’ve never been able to make sense of. Comedians offer the hope, the chance, however slim, that it’s not you that’s broken but the world. And they dress up in cool clothes! And hang out with various late-night hosts named Jimmy! And they make people laugh, and those people then love them. I can’t say for certain that depression leads people to a career in comedy, but it seems like the path is smoothly paved and well lit. Comedian Solomon Georgio came to the United States as a refugee from Ethiopia when he was three years old, and his family relied on comedy early on for entertainment and education. “We all loved comedy because that’s one of the few things that we comprehended when we didn’t speak the language,” he says. “Surprisingly, standup comedy, too, which, even though we didn’t know what was going on, you kind of see a rhythm and you know people are being entertained and laughing along. So we watched a lot of old television. Three Stooges, I Love Lucy, and, like, slapstick. We just immediately started watching and enjoying. So you can only imagine how disappointed I was when I met my first white person in real life and I was like, ‘Oh, you’re not like the Three Stooges. I can’t slap you and poke you in the eye. You guys aren’t doing any of that stuff out here. Okay.

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.

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.

I want to share all this in one place because if we talk, things get better, and more people we love might stick around so we can love them more.

there is nothing more intoxicating for a depressed person with an alcoholic parent in his past than being told you are loved and wanted.

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.

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

I didn’t know that depression isn’t a mood. It’s a set of conditions that cause a whole series of thoughts and behaviors to happen over a long period of time, often things that are wildly different from one another.

It wasn’t you. You didn’t choose this. No one would ever choose this. It’s not your fault.

There is reason for optimism when one moves from ignorance to understanding but no guarantees.

bit is about how an intrusive suicidal ideation can show up when you least expect it, how true deep despair appears out of nowhere. That is terrifying because it feels like a killer on the loose.

I didn’t want to die, but I wanted to take my brain out of my head for a while.

There was another reason, too, one I didn't tell her. And this will make perfect sense to people who have dealt with depression and make absolutely no sense to people who never have: I didn't want to waste the doctor's time. I knew for a fact that I could not be helped, so let that appointment go to someone with solvable problems. Reader, the whole point of a doctor is to know more than you do, assess a problem, and then help you. Seeing people and trying to help them is the entirety of their job, and thus if you are a person, you are worthy of being seen. You are worthy of help. "I'm not going to a doctor. I mean, what if they put me on pills and I become a zombie or something? Plus, it's a copay." Our co-pay at the time was $10. I was not worth $10. "If you don't love yourself enough to go do this, do you at least love me and the kids?" Oof. "Yes.

One of the first issues I wanted to tackle was this habit of converting stress into bleak, goth-eyeliner-wearing despair.

it makes sense when you think about the confluence of puberty hormones, stress from academics and the emergence of primitive appalling forms of dating, depression starts in your junior high.

Novelist John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars among many other megaselling books, has struggled with [depression] for many years. "There is this weird perpetual hope," he told me, "not just among people with mental illness-- I don't know if it's American or if it's human or what-- but there does seem to be this perpetual hope that if I just get this one thing that my life is missing, the hole inside of me will be filled.

By applying actual words with significant specific diagnostic meanings to much lighter circumstances, people are robbing and devaluing people with mental illness.

Yes, there is discrimination against people with mental illness and, yes, it can be a scary thing to talk about. But the hunger to do so is there, and by being open yourself you can get that conversation out on the dance floor.

Finding a therapist is a bit like dating. You might have to have some very boring or weird or tense meetings before you find someone you connect with. I’d had good therapists in the past, briefly, but all I ever took away from therapy was a somewhat clearer understanding of how messed up I was. That’s helpful, sure, but it’s not really progress. Like knowing the brand of refrigerator you’re locked in. And this was not the fault of the therapists I had seen, who were all trained pros and good at their jobs. It was my fault, or Clinny D’s fault. I never wanted to go all that deep in therapy because that’s where the monsters were. I’m talking about the really really bad memories, the deep bruises, the scars, the events that significantly shape a person through injury. Trauma. Rather than tackle the past, I was willing to settle for a tense ceasefire with it, letting my life be like Middle East countries that hate each other. There would be car bombings, but a homeland is a homeland. I mean, depression doesn’t even want you to get up, take a shower, and brush your teeth, so something like figuring out how your own mind works feels about as easy as taking a bus to Mars.