Thread by @kemimarie

i didn’t know i was depressed until i wasn’t and this is what i mean:

i have moderate depression and severe anxiety… which i didn’t know until i went to a therapist & a psychiatrist. i have bipolar 2 which means i experience manic episodes & depressive ones. i have depressive ones for 3 months & manic for 3 and then repeat.

nothing i say takes away from severe depression or anything we know to be depression. i’m just speaking to how depression showed up in my life.

i used to think that since i had moments of joy in my life, that i was not depressed.

i used to hang onto the narratives of severe depression & anxiety that the media showed and in doing so, i failed to realize the spectrum which it exists on. i want people to see depression outside of this idea that it’s only being sad bc it can be much more

for me, depression was a dullness of life, a lot of chasing my future bc i dreaded my present moment, emotions different every day (i would pray for consistent emotions), trudging day to day in a monotonous routine. for me it was irritation, anxiety, a big “ughhhh,”

overstimulated by my environment. TIRED & wanted to stay at home. going out was draining. super self critical. wanting to quit everything & needing to retreat for months at a time. depression was painted to me as an emotion but my experience with it has been so much more

depression felt like a weight on my life. a sunken hole in my spirit. something felt unfulfilled and it was so continuous. i spent so much time just waiting for the next spike of joy, of freedom.

i held onto so many negative core beliefs (shoutout my therapist) and i genuinely believed so many of these until this year. i remember the state of mind i was in… and life was heavy.

life was so heavy & i didn’t know it until i was light. when i say heavy, i mean my body felt so heavy, days felt heavy, etc. it was like a dark cloud & i thought that was the only reality. i only saw dark or light.

i didn’t realize i could experience equanimity; mental calmness and evenness in temper. bliss. i just thought my mental state was normal. i really did not know that internal calm, consistently, existed.

i wish someone would’ve told me that a quiet mind and an evenness of temper exists. i wish someone would’ve told me that i don’t have to be like that, that’s there’s more. bc like i said, i genuinely didn’t know.

on top of all that, i was grinding to provide for my family and to complete college. i really was focused on everything else but my health. it was only when i started resting and emphasizing care that i realized how depleted i was of care and how full i was of repressed emotion.

i didn’t know i could experience so much continuous goodness until the past 3 months.

if life is a full bottle of water, depression for me, felt like that bottle was buried far underneath the sand while everyone played on top of it.

& i didn’t know until someone dug me out.