To my depression,
I have so much resentment towards you. You’ve entered my head as a reckless thief. You’re robbing me of what are supposed to be the best years of my life. You cast your gloomy, harmful shadow over the last few of my teenage years and now you’re casting that same shadow over my twenties. Please stop robbing me of my carefree exuberance, of the time I have to feel the most alive and to squeeze every ounce of life this world has in it. Please settle for what you’ve already taken from me and take no more.
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. Let me make plenty of mistakes but more importantly let me make plenty of memories. Stop suppressing the twenty-two-year-old woman that I dream of being. It isn’t fair. I won’t ever be this young again.
Stop ruining any friendships and relationships that come into my life. I know that you want to spend more time with me than I want to spend with you, but please stop being selfish. Don’t keep me at home when I could be out doing things with the people in my life. You tell me that staying home and isolating myself is what’s best for me “in the moment” and that “tomorrow, you’ll let me socialize”, but I know these are bold faced lies to keep me under your control. Every day is the exact same, no matter what you tell me 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 and make me stay home for the next week. Depression, please stop holding me as your hostage.
You exhaust me so much that by the time I get home at the end of the day, I don’t have any energy left 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, close myself in, and isolate 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 and hide under the covers just to make it through the day.
You seem to always turn away any chance of me being with someone who makes me happy. You make for immensely unappealing baggage to carry around with me. People don’t want to have to shoulder the burden of you, so when you rear your ugly head, they begin to back away until they avoid me altogether. 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’re too much for me to handle sometimes, too, but unlike everyone else, I don’t have a choice.
Are you just jealous that I spend time with people other than you? Do you hang around me all the time because you need attention because you enjoy being selfish? Stop ruining relationships. Stop ruining any chance of love that comes into my life. You make it so hard for me to be anything but alone. You get high off isolating me and removing love from my life. 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 taken over all the hobbies I used to have and all the things I used to enjoy doing. 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 or family. I used to love going on random adventures and spending time outside. 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. 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.
Most of all Depression, you make me isolate myself. You make me feel as though I’m not worthy of anyone company or attention. You make me feel as though I’m not good enough for anyone as if I’m not enough for anyone. 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 in 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 person. 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, I’m begging you to back off. You’re robbing me of my youth and of my freedom. You’re ruining friendships and relationships. You’re forcing me into isolation. You make me feel like there isn’t anything in the world to live for. You make me feel worthless beyond belief. 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 feel like I’m wasting my life because of you. You’re making me waste my precious time here on earth and I hate you so much for it. 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 turn every man 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.
Featured image via Andrew Neel on Unsplash
