How to TipToe Around Depression
When it’s your roommate
4 min readNov 7, 2019
- Pick out your clothes the night before because mornings take too much effort. Change your mind two or three times while lying in bed, waiting for sleep to come. The next morning, try on every outfit you own that fits the occasion. Be happy with none of them. Wear the last outfit you try on because you are now running late.
- Set more alarms than is necessary for the morning: one which is the ideal time to get up, and one which is the last possible minute needed to get ready and just make it out the door in time. Hit snooze on all of them. Because, once again, mornings take too much effort.
- Decide one morning you don’t need to wear make-up because you’re beautiful anyway. Take a selfie to document the occasion. Freak out because your nose looks bigger than you remember it being. Contemplate getting a nose job. Talk yourself out of it. It’s permanent, and the finality of using a sticker is enough to stress you out.
- Breathe in. Hold it. Count to five. Breathe out, trying to slow your racing heart, which is only outpaced by your racing thoughts.
- Get bangs that cover your eyebrows. There are more important things to be worried about (i.e., everything) than doing your eyebrows.
- Write down everything that happens on anything you can find: receipts in your wallet, iPhone notes, random scraps of paper found in the deepest recesses over your over-sized purse. Remember what it’s like to feel on your darkest days. Live to feel these things again.
- Take pictures of every beautiful thing you see: sunrises and sunsets; flowers and gardens; fields and clouds; coffee and food. Don’t let anybody take away your joy by reducing you to a stereotype — you are anything but.
- Wake up in the middle of the night needing to pee. Put it off until you can’t hold it any longer. You stumble half-asleep down the hall, past the stairs, avoiding looking down. You’re not scared of the dark. You’ve come to accept it. It’s the unknown human-like shadows that freak you out. When you wash your hands, avoid looking in the mirror above the sink. You don’t necessarily believe those ghost stories, but you’d rather not find out. At 3 am, when you’re not fully awake, you look like a ghost of yourself anyway.
- Walk through your local cemetery. Take note of the gravestones; the startings and the endings; the oldest and the youngest; the epitaphs and the ones that say nothing. Wonder what yours will say — not in a macabre way, but in a “will I have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish” way. Make up stories of those buried there (it’s a different form of people watching, something you love to do). You haven’t yet visited your grandfather’s grave — you don’t handle death well.
- Eat freely. Love deeply. Remember what it was like when you deprived yourself of food and love.
- Dream big. Don’t be afraid to fail. Being a Bills’ fan has helped you learn how to deal with disappointment.
- Become an English major. Worry that you ruined your life because “it’s not a practical degree.” Tell people you’re not a practical person. You follow your heart and not your head. You see the world in shades of grey, not black and white.
- Lie in bed at night thinking about every possible outcome to every possible scenario so you’re not surprised when they happen. Write dialogue for every possible conversation in your head. That way, when you do work up the courage to speak, you don’t make a fool of yourself.
- Remember words are your most powerful tool.
- Give names to your intrusive thoughts. Call them out when they fill your head with stupid ideas: “No, Fred. I will NOT drive headfirst into this tree.” “Shut up, Gertrude. I know there are about 20 Advil in my hand right now, but I only need two.” You are too busy trying to live to listen to those who drag you down.
- Remember you are not a walking billboard for Depression. You are so much more than one word. You are smart, funny, kind. So, in the grand scheme of things, you can’t be that bad.
- Sleep with headphones playing nothing in. The crickets outside your window have been extra noisy lately. Depression needs silence to sleep. You’ve discovered that after so many years of co-habitation, you do too.
- Set your alarm on the quietest possible setting you can. You are a light sleeper. Maybe if you can get ready and leave the house quickly and quietly, depression will stay sleeping. If it wakes up, it will chase you. It’s like a dog. Unlike a dog, there’s nothing cute about any of this.
- When you are struggling, call it out. Give it a name. Say, “Yes, I have depression. But I am not Depression. I am a human who is living with it. I am strong. I am a fighter. I will not give up.”
- If all this fails, try again tomorrow.
