What Depression Feels Like

A day adrift

This is a piece I wrote on a day I was feeling depressed and couldn’t get myself to do much else, so I decided to try to capture what I was experiencing in that moment—with the disclaimer that there is no single way to experience depression, and I don’t mean to speak for anyone else’s experience, or even for my own experience on a different day or in a different moment. If this topic is triggering for you, please take care of yourself and come back to it if and when you feel ready. 

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It’s not sadness. It’s not anger. 

It’s not crying or screaming or longing (not today anyway). 

No, it’s listless. It’s melancholy. It’s blank.

This depression feels like floating in the middle of the ocean on a life raft made of driftwood pieces tied together with rope. There is no land on the horizon; no island oasis. Just thousands of miles of empty sea in every direction, and I’m bobbing up and down in small waves. There’s no threat of tempest or pirates or sharks; there’s just the humdrum of endless days that finish as they began. There’s a sunrise and a sunset that bookend the hours of baking sun without shade. There’s hunger and thirst but no way to satisfy either, so no effort made in trying. There’s just staring at the empty horizon, hoping to catch sight of a passing ship, yet knowing it will not save me. 

It’s numbness of thought and action. What sparked joy last week or last month seems pointless. Everything I’ve been waiting for time to do or read or write evaporates while the clock ticks and the hours pass. 

It arrives unexpectedly, this depression. It fills the days in between the fertility treatments and foster care trainings and miscarriage support groups. But it doesn’t seem connected to any of those things. It’s a feeling or energy more than it’s a thought or worry. 

It’s an existential thing, defined more by what’s missing than by what’s there:

There are no children coming home from school. 

There is no job to go to tomorrow. 

There is no discernible future to plan for or look forward to. 

It’s caught me by surprise this time. I wake up as if swimming in molasses, slowly and deliberately forcing my limbs through the thickness and heaviness of the world around me. 

In practice, it looks like staring at a pile of insurance claims, shuffling them around, then putting them back in a pile for later. It looks like spending an hour cleaning the kitchen counters but leaving the pile of hiking gear on the floor by the washing machine. It looks like noticing the gnaw of hunger in my belly, opening the fridge, then closing it and going to lie down. It looks like a lot of lying down, not sleeping or reading, just staring at the wall, waiting for the day to end. 

I can usually snap out of it, at least temporarily, if I go out in the woods for an hour and move my body, but there is no will for that. There is only staring out the window. 

I don’t know what to do with it. Am I supposed to honor my melancholy, to embrace it? Or try to banish it through forced activity? Or to distract myself from it?

It’s been quite clear this time that it won’t be ignored. It doesn’t want me to pick up a book or turn on the TV. It won’t let me exercise. It doesn’t want me to call anyone. Aren’t those the things the internet says I should do when I feel this way?

Most days, I am just in it—-floating on the raft. Swimming in the molasses. Lying on the bed staring at the wall. It demands my full attention to absolutely nothing. 

I wonder what brings it on. Is it the grief and loss humming in the background of every day? Is it the fertility drugs messing with my hormones? Is it something someone said, or didn’t say? Is it the full moon?

Its slowness makes the depression easier to deal with than the anxiety. The anxiety is throat-strangling, chest-crushing, heart-pounding. The depression is limp and listless like an unwatered flower. It’s quiet and calm and gray. 

It ebbs and flows. Chances are tomorrow or next week or next month I’ll be off to the races with some new idea, inspiration, or adventure that will distract me for a while from the emptiness. Perhaps it will even bring me joy. 

If I stay adrift long enough, I hope, maybe I’ll float my way to some interesting harbor where I can moor my raft, then take its wood and build myself a home. Maybe there will be good food and music there; friends and laughter; new trails to explore. I know such a place exists, but I’m powerless to navigate towards it when I’m at sea. 

There is one non-negotiable in my day: no matter what else I do or do not do, I will shower. I will take off my pajamas and stand under the hot water and scrub my body with soap that smells good. Then I’ll put on clean pajamas and dry my hair and start fresh. Seth will come home from work and feed me a healthy dinner. Maybe we’ll watch something funny on TV. 

Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and my raft will have floated ashore—if not the harbor, then the island oasis where I’ll drink a coconut and eat some tropical fruit and sit in the shade of a palm and fortify myself for the journey that lies ahead; the journey that is my life.