Living with depression and anxiety is hard. I hear a lot of people who tell me, and others, just get over it. If it were that simple, I would have been cured a long time ago. I know that some people think they are helping by trying to motivate or drive those suffering but I want to take a moment to describe some ways a person acts the way they do and what they are thinking while suffering.

Randomly during the day you have the crushing weight of ALL your failures hit you all at once. It’s like having a personal highlight reel of worst moments set up in a compilation video playing through your brain over and over. Most depressed people are very intelligent and have a good memory. Because of this, your flaws and failures are branded and seared into your brain for you to remember. I still remember the time when I was 7 and I burnt my thumb on a hot iron right after my mother told me not to touch it. I was so excited to be going to a friends house down the street right after that happened and I was so scared that I would be in trouble I hid my pain and went to my friends house. Soon upon arrival my friends mother noticed my tears of pain and looked at my thumb. She was surprised that my mother would send me down there without doing something about my thumb. She called my mother asking about and surprised my mother with something my mother didn’t know anything about. It was no surprised that I was promptly sent home to both be healed and to be in trouble.

I tell this story because I am still embarrassed about trying to hid it. I still have it in the back of mind of what I did wrong. I still remember the pain of my thumb on fire. It pops in my head about every other week to remind me of how I have failed. I live with that memory and every other mistake and failure I have done in my life. I wish I could stop those memories from drowning me and some days I do great.

Other days not so much.

And its not just your mistakes.

When something goes wrong with someone else, you react two ways. You question if you messed something up, EVEN IF YOU HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. You cannot stop yourself from wondering if you could have done something to have helped them or if you could have changed something. The second way you react is you overreact by being overly sorry for what happened, again even if you had nothing to with what happened. You try to comfort and help that person in such a way that you end up looking like a “freak”.

It makes for a hard time trying to deal with other people’s failures while having your own failures play constantly playing in your mind.

It also makes you paranoid. You question everyone’s jokes and teasing. You are observing all the things going on around you and analyzing it. You wonder how much is true and what is a joke. You live in constant fear of what you say and how it could be taken wrong.

And this makes you tired.

You carry the weight of that around with you. The reason it is hard to get out of bed for a depressed person is two-fold. First, you are tired from carrying yours and everyone else’s burdens (even if they didn’t ask for it). Second, you know the only relief is sleep. Sleep because it is when you finally get a break.

It is hard to be depressed. It is hard living with anxiety.

I saw a post on social media that inspired this post and I want to share it now.

Fear. You live in constant fear.

“What if?”

The next time you see a depressed person or know someone who is depressed, take two seconds and think on these things. I could save a life.

#hugapony my friends.