I’ve been a depressive as far back as I can remember.

I say this not to elicit a “poor Sonya” response from my dozen or so readers. I say it, along with the rest of this post, so they and others will understand just how crippling depression can be.

At this point, a lot of my childhood is opaque to me. No, I don’t have any of the major traumas of physical or sexual abuse in my past, thank goodness—though my heartfelt sympathy goes out to anyone who does. I just don’t want to remember it because I never remember being happy or even content for any sustained period of time as a kid. Not ever. I’ve only had a couple of short stints as an adult, for that matter, and none in the last nearly 3 years.

I honestly don’t know how much of it is simply my brain chemistry and how much of it is situational. Once you’ve spent enough of your life as a depressive, it becomes almost impossible to separate the two and the difference certainly feels academic from where I sit, even if that’s medically and/or psychologically not the case.

Depression is like many other chronic conditions—chronic pain, for example—in in that it’s invisible and therefore hard to sympathize with or truly understand for most people. It also doesn’t help that the word, “depression,” is used to also describe more transient mood-troughs. If clinical depression had some visible stigmata to compare to the spots of chicken pox or the yellow skin of hepatitis, perhaps people would take it more seriously and wouldn’t say things like “cheer up!” as if it were somehow that simple.

But what it does to you is horrible. Now, I’m not looking to set up a debate about who has it worse than whom here, either. Every chronic medical or psychological issue and every trauma is horrible in its own unique, debilitating, life-sucking way. I’m just saying that clinical depression blows goats for cab fare, regardless of where it may rank on any scale of comparative horribleness. 

It taints everything in your life. It leeches the joy out of your triumphs, makes you say “why bother?” to things you once found satisfying, and puts any moment of happiness or contentment under a warped microscope to find its inevitable doom (thereby, of course, hastening that doom). Success becomes impossible, failure assured. It can severely damage your personal relationships…with family, friends, lovers, anyone…and prevent you from seeking out new ones.

It is trying your best to snap shut Pandora’s Box and finding that you’ve only retained despair rather than hope under the lid. Omnipresent, it lurks to strike anew when any short respite is drawing to a close, like something out of HP Lovecraft, draining any happiness away and reminding you that your struggle with it simply will not end until you die.

I say these things as someone who’s been in psychological therapy for years with a very good therapist and whose mood-altering regimen is currently comprised of no less than three separate medications (Lexapro, Wellbutrin XL, and Remeron, if you were wondering). Once upon a time an for many years, one drug—Paxil—was enough to get me through. Now, my system laughs at just one.

I’ve tried hobbies, exercise (yes, really), diets, supplements, “keeping myself too busy to be depressed,” affirmations…everything but religion (’cause, yaknow, I’m just a bit too smart to be believing stories about invisible men in the sky and crucified people becoming zombies or gardens filled with 72 virgins—and really, wouldn’t 72 sluts be so much better in terms of the experience to be had? just asking—or burning bushes or “magick” spells or energy-channeling crystals or cheap neurological tricks, just to name a few). Nothing works for me, and each attempt only deepens the depression for being another “failure” in a long series of them going all the way back to my squandered “potential” to be the next fucking Einstein or something. Long story, written about it elsewhere, won’t get into it here right now.

I’ve just lost another weekend of my life to this disease, though, and my wherewithal is really flagging now. Between the way the last few years have gone (in so many ways) and the recent development of spending way too much time at home thanks to my company “going virtual” I find myself with way too much time to stew in my own psychological juices and no hope, no goal, no light at the end of the tunnel to pull me through and keep me putting one figurative foot in front of the other.

Needless to say, this makes me great fun at parties and oh-so-attractive to everyone I meet. (Never mind that, even assuming I could find someone interested in me, finding even one woman who actually fits my needs is starting to feel like searching for unicorns or moderate Republicans after 8 years of Dubya…makes being “poly” feel like an academic exercise.)

Just do one thing for me…if you have a friend who’s depressive (or has any other chronic, “invisible” ailment, for that matter), reach out to them and keep reaching out. Don’t stop, even if you meet with tepid response…it’s the depression talking. Nothing feeds depression more than feeling like the whole world really wouldn’t care one way or the other if you lived or died. Isolation is a killer to the depressive, and its unfortunately something that’s all too easy to fall into when it’s bad and it’s leeching away your will to so much as pick up the phone and call a friend. Sometimes that little effort from you is all they need to “kick-start” and keep some forward momentum going for a while.

It’s worth it, I promise.