So the one direction below this is quite a bit more serious. That's why I picked it. There are some things you can laugh about it's true that I talk to my friend who also struggles with depression and sometimes it's like a laugh fest because we're both feeling good and so yeah, we're gonna laugh about how all we wanted to do was read books, or watch Netflix for the rest of our lives and just let ourselves waste away in bed because real life is too hard. But then there are the moments where you literally feel like death. You feel like a shadow of
There are a lot of ways to express how depression feels but I've tried to describe my experience a few times so I'll just add that. Sometimes it's a feeling of lethargy, and sometimes it produces anger. But when you sit down on the edge of your bed and the only person you have to be honest with is yourself you want to lie. You want to lie to yourself because you want to pretend that you're okay, but you're not. You feel like you're laying that the bottom of the ocean looking up and you can see the surface, you can see the sunshine and you know that you could feel better but when you try to swim up you realized you're chained to the ground. So you scream and the only thing that happens is that your lungs fill with water. Then people look at you and say things like "Just get over it", "Just choose to swim to the surface", "Just stop breathing", "You let yourself get chained here again?", "Are you praying? Are you studying your scriptures?", "I know how you feel, just come on", "It's not a big deal", "You don't need medical help", or "You just need to be more positive about life".
Let me tell you something about all those phrases, they don't help. Shaming someone, or delegitimizing (is that a word?) how they feel or what they're dealing with is NOT helpful. In fact you're making things worse when you say things like this. I don't want anyone to suddenly feel horribly guilty for having said these sorts of things in the past but don't say them any more. I'm about to speak for everyone who has ever had depression. We know we're depressed, and we know what everyone else is thinking and saying and we know it's not helping. You don't need to remind us that once again we are depressed. You don't need to give us advice on something you really don't know anything about. And please don't bring religion in to it. Personally I feel like studying my scriptures is helpful, but that doesn't make it go away! And that's such an easy way to shame people and that will only make it worse. NEVER tell someone they don't need medical help or that they don't need to take medication for their depression. I take anti-depressants and when I very first got on them I was terrified to tell anyone. It didn't make sense at all because my friends weren't going to stop being my friends or anything, but I felt like if they knew then they would know that I wasn't perfect. That I had problems and I felt like people would just know and be disgusted by me. Which makes no sense!! So don't ever make someone feel bad for taking medications to help them. I hate taking pills and having to do all of that stuff but you do the things that you have to, to make things better. You get a cast when you brake a bone and no one thinks that's a bad idea. Obviously it's not exactly the same but you get the idea. Don't tell me, or anyone with depression, that we need to be "more positive" or that we just need to "choose to be happy". Ugh! I'm sorry, that's SO irritating! Do you think that I'm CHOOSING to feel depressed!? NO! Why on earth would I chose to feel like life is barely worth living? Why would anyone ever chose to feel like they're being drowned and beaten all at once? No one would. So stop telling us to chose to feel differently. Some of it is choice but so much of it is chemistry that we're trying to balance by changing diet and taking those anti-depressants you say are shameful. So stop. You don't know what you're talking about.
And I'm sorry if that last bit was intense. I got a little angry. :/ But moving on, that's depression and it's hard and it's SO real. Stop ignoring it. Ask people about it, show them you care, try to see what they're seeing even if you can't feel it.
Now I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about being diabetic. :) I realize that this is a little rant-ish but I need to dispel some myths and tell you about my experience so that perhaps you can be a help for the people you know or meet. So first things first imma give you a cute little comic to read so you can understand diabetes a little better because you might not know very much yet.
So hopefully that helps a little. :) I'm always happy to answer questions and talk about diabetes. It's actually kind of fun sometimes. So let's talk Type 1 versus Type 2. We call type 1 "Juvenal Diabetes" and type 2 "Adult Onset" but that's not always true. In recent years with the increase of child obesity they have see type 2 diabetes occur in children. They have also seen adults (I have a brother-in-law) come in with type 1. So type 2 is pretty much associated with personal health. It's generally preventable, and quite manageable if you're willing to work at it. It's also the one we ascoiate with being overweight like I was saying but I also want to add that you don't have to be "fat" to be a diabetic. We don't really know the causes so yeah. Keep that in mind before you tell a diabetic they shouldn't have diabetes because they're "not fat" it's just annoying. Type 1, however, is very different. The thing is that we don't know what actually caused diabetes. They speculate and they talk about a lot of different things, but they don't know. People will say "well they were born with it" and some people are "born" with it, but they're still not sure what caused their pancreas to not work. So that's the very first frustration of diabetes. We don't know how we got it and we don't know how to fix it because there isn't a cure. We have a means of handling it so we don't die, but there is not a cure. And every year they say "we'll have a cure for diabetes in the next ten years" as those "ten" years turn into twenty, then thirty and you get the idea. So, similarly to depression, we don't really like the "it could be so much worse" little thing people like to do. We get it, and we're grateful for what we have but sometime we just wanna complain about it for a minute because it's not fun.
I'd also like to add one personal preference. I appreciate what you're trying to do when you get a type 1 diabetic sugar free candy but, um, it tastes gross and we can take insulin. We don't have to watch our diet the same way so could you just stop. My pancreas doesn't work but my taste buds are alive and well.
So I've been going on for quite a while, I want to finish up and really get to the point. I hope that all of this was helpful, and if nothing else I hope it was entertaining. I had fun writing it. I LOVE answering questions about these things so don't be shy if you're wondering anything ever. But I wanted to talk about both depression and diabetes because they're both things that society, as a whole in general, likes to kind of ignore. We want to pretend they don't exist because we're not sure how to handle people who have to live like this. Imagine someone saying the things people say to children with depression or diabetes to a child with autism....just picture it for a minute. And then I want you to rethink the way you behave and the way the people around you behave towards depression, diabetes, and other mental illness and auto-immune disorders. These things can be helped and managed but they don't go away. So treat people kindly. They deserve your kindness no matter who they are or what they struggle with but especially be kind to those whom you don't understand. Everyone has a story and if you get to be familiar with someone's story you fall in love with the kind of person they are and you learn to love them for their faults. I could really go into that mini analogy but I'm just gonna stop because I've gone on long enough. Thank you for reading this and for being interested. You're wonderful, and I hope that this helps you to help yourself or the people around you.
