Since I got my diagnosis and have learned more about how depression works in general and how it affects me in particular, I can loot back over my life and pin point other times when I was going through a major depressive episode, but didn't have the tools to recognize it, let alone deal with it.
I think you've captured the sense of everyday action being difficult with the pea soup metaphor.
I also get anxiety, particularly social anxiety, and I recognize a lot of the issues you describe about feeling worthless and paranoid in company.
My friend springheel_jack wrote an amazing post on depression several years ago and which he has since made "friends only) but I don't think he'll mind if I quote from it:
There is a corresponding myth that depressives get "invested" in their disease, that they want to keep suffering, that they'd rather lie inert than do things, that somehow they like being ill. Nonsense, and again nonsense: bullshit. The paradox of major depression, what makes it so hard for people who haven't felt it to understand, is that it's as painful as standing in bare feet on a blazing-hot griddle, and you can't make yourself step off. You can't even see an end to the griddle, can't imagine where or how you would step off. Would you get off if you could? Of-fucking-course you would! That level of pain is not something any organism will tolerate if it can help it.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2013-05-29 03:03 pm (UTC)Since I got my diagnosis and have learned more about how depression works in general and how it affects me in particular, I can loot back over my life and pin point other times when I was going through a major depressive episode, but didn't have the tools to recognize it, let alone deal with it.
I think you've captured the sense of everyday action being difficult with the pea soup metaphor.
I also get anxiety, particularly social anxiety, and I recognize a lot of the issues you describe about feeling worthless and paranoid in company.
My friend
There is a corresponding myth that depressives get "invested" in their disease, that they want to keep suffering, that they'd rather lie inert than do things, that somehow they like being ill. Nonsense, and again nonsense: bullshit. The paradox of major depression, what makes it so hard for people who haven't felt it to understand, is that it's as painful as standing in bare feet on a blazing-hot griddle, and you can't make yourself step off. You can't even see an end to the griddle, can't imagine where or how you would step off. Would you get off if you could? Of-fucking-course you would! That level of pain is not something any organism will tolerate if it can help it.