"Depression is a hell price to wake up to life"

The depression is smaller than you. She is always smaller than you, even when you feel her immense. She acts within you, not you within her.

Thirteen years ago I was going to die, you know? Or to go crazy. It was impossible for me to continue here. Sometimes I doubted even being able to hold ten more minutes. And it was impossible for me to think that I would feel enough confidence and confidence to write about it.

One of the key symptoms of depression is that you do not see any hope. No future Not only do you not see a light at the end of the tunnel, but both ends seem blocked, and you are inside.

But that you are reading these words proves that depression lies. Depression makes you think wrong things. But depression itself is not a lie. It is the most real thing I have experienced in my life.

Of course, it is invisible. Others do not even perceive it. You walk around with your head on fire but nobody can see the fire. And so - because depression is something hidden and mysterious that, in general, is not seen - the stigma survives ...

This is particularly cruel for depressives because it affects thoughts and depression is a disease of thought.

The sun sinks behind a cloud and you feel that slight atmospheric change as if a friend had died.

You feel the difference between inside and outside as a baby feels the difference between the womb and the world. The mind is infinite and its torments-when they occur-can also be. I feared more than anything else to drive me crazy.

They say that madness is a logical reaction to a crazy world ... Maybe depression is, in part, simply, a reaction to a life that we don't really understand. Can be...

Depression, for me, was not dullness, but an exacerbation, an intensification, as if I had been living in a seashell before and now that shell was gone. I felt a total lack of protection.

It was a naked mind, raw. A skinned personality. A brain in a jar full of acid that is the experience.

When you are depressed you feel alone and you think that no one suffers as you are suffering. You are so afraid of looking crazy that you shut everything up, and you fear so much that others will take you for granted that you lock yourself in yourself and do not talk about what happens to you, which is a shame, because talking about it helps.

The words-spoken or written-connect us to the world, to others and to our true selves.

With my words, I want to convince you that the bottom of the valley never offers you the best views. And the old topics are still the most certain. Time heals. And words, sometimes, can free you.

Now listen. If you have ever believed that a person with depression wants to be happy, you are wrong. He could not care less about the luxury of happiness. He just wants to stop feeling pain. Escape from a burning mind, where thoughts burn and smoke like old possessions destroyed in a fire.

You want to stop living. But the strange thing about depression is that, for more suicidal thoughts you have, the fear of death remains the same. The only difference is that life hurts more and more.

So when someone takes their own life, it is important to know that death still scared the same.

Depression is one of the most deadly diseases on the planet. It kills more people than the sum of almost all other forms of violence: wars, terrorism, domestic violence, rapes and attacks with weapons.

Depression is such a serious disease that it causes more suicides than any other disease. However, people still do not believe that depression is really something so serious.

If you also combine anxiety with depression, it's a bit like mixing cocaine with alcohol. Accelerate the experience to the maximum.

If you have only depression, your mind sinks into a swamp and loses thrust; If anxiety is added to the cocktail, the swamp is still a swamp, but there are swirls.

The monsters that are there, in the mud, move incessantly like alligators. You do not have a second of truce, not a moment of the day that you are not dominated by fear. I'm not exaggerating. You long for a moment, a single second without being terrified, but it never comes.

The disease you have is not a single part of the body, something you can think about from the outside. If your back hurts, you can say “the back is killing me”, and there will be a kind of separation between the pain and the self.

Pain is something apart. It attacks and annoys you, and even corrodes you, but even so, it is not me. Instead, with depression and anxiety, pain is not something you think about, because it is precisely what you think. 

But nothing lasts forever. This pain will end. He tells you it will last. But lie. Ignore it. Pain is a debt that is settled over time. One day you will experience a joy that will compensate for this pain.

You will cry of euphoria listening to the Beach Boys, you will contemplate the face of a baby that rests on your lap, you will meet great friends, you will eat delicious dishes that you have not yet tried, you will contemplate a landscape from an elevated place without calculating the chances of falling and dying .

There are books that you have not yet read and that will enrich you, movies that you will watch while eating giant bowls of popcorn, and you will dance and laugh until your body hurts.

I am glad to have recovered to a great extent without medication, and I feel that having experienced the pain "without anesthesia" pushed me to know it very well and to stay alert to the signs of the subtle ups and downs of my mind. By not taking medication I got more harmony with myself.

That helped me know what exactly made me feel better. And that state of alertness, that deep attention that I know - for myself and others - that the pills can cause you to lose, in the end, he sustained me to rebuild from scratch.

If I had been dull or immersed in that otherness that drugs can make you feel, everything would have been more difficult. Maybe we should look at how we live and how our mind is not made for the life we ​​lead.

Something that I did not realize because I would have been incomprehensible, was that this state of mind would eventually produce both positive and negative effects. Because once we begin to recover, and to live again, we do it with new eyes.

Everything becomes clearer, and we become aware of things that we did not repair before. Yes, depression is a nightmare. But it can also be useful. Something like a nightmare that improves your world in different ways.

For example, I write because of depression. I was not a writer before. I just did not have the intensity to explore with the necessary curiosity and energy.

Fear makes us curious. Sadness makes us philosophize.

So, even if the depression is not completely overcome, we can learn to use what Lord Byron called a “terrible gift” and we can use it in life. For example, I discover that being so aware of mortality can turn me into a person firmly determined to enjoy life anywhere.

And let me tell you something. It will sound bland and maudlin, but, I assure you, it is something I completely believe in: love saves us. Love saved me. Andrea, my partner. She saved me. His love for me and my love for her. And not once. Many. One, and another, and another ...

Do not think that it is a perfect relationship. It was not. And it still isn't. Before manifesting my illness we discussed. But if you dive deep enough under a tidal wave, the water is calm. That's how we were. In a way, we argued because we knew that blood would not reach the river.

When you can be who you are with someone, you project out your dissatisfied self. And that happened to me. I was not happy And when the depression attacked, Andrea was by my side. He waited for me patiently during my absence from myself.