Writing About Depression

Writing about depression is harder than it seemed to me. My respect for people who have written well about the subject rises by the minute. What makes it difficult is not a prevalent social stigma; I’m lucky enough to live in one of the saner places on Earth. To write an appropriate text seems nearly insurmountable, as everything I wrote so far seemed either too personal, too abstract, too simplified, too emotional, not emotional enough, missing key pieces… Inadequate.

And of course, there remains the “coming around to it” issue: Whenever I was depressed, writing about depression sounded good in my head, but sitting down and writing… Well, one of the (many) small issues of depression is, that it makes stuff I want to do so much more demanding than just doing nothing, and so I “decide” to do it another time.

And when I’m well (like now, luckily enough), I sometimes have too much to do, want to keep my mind on happier thoughts – or simply forget about it. I want to stress that last point. Although the transition from “I know right now I’m depressed” to “Strange, I actually feel well!” is slow, tedious, sometimes painful, and includes many setbacks, when approaching the end of such a path I’m usually already thinking about… doing stuff, chilling out. Not thinking about how painful life can be. It’s not one of the nice places in my head. Better things to do.

However, I do want to write, because I want to give a hint on an answer to recurring questions. And because I have experienced that writing about stuff makes it easier to come to terms with it. And because I hope that doing so this time will make it possible to actually close that chapter, at least for some time. May it last long.

Now I write.