For anyone suffering with this devastating mental illness, know you are not alone and you are stronger than you think. Please seek professional help if you are feeling helpless. There is aways, always hope.
1. You do everything you can to try to hide the fact that you have it.
When you have depression, you try to convince yourself that you are completely fine. You put on a fake smile wherever you go and your friends envy your enthusiasm and energy that you always seem to have. But inside? You feel drained, lost and terribly sad.
2. You lash out at loved ones.
You tend to lose your temper over things other people wouldn’t even get worked up about. You harbor a lot of negative energy inside of your heart and sometimes lashing out is the only thing that you can do to get it all out.
3. You redo everything.
Whether it’s a school paper, or an excel sheet for work, you redo it over and over again until your eyes are glazed over. You are a complete perfectionist and you can’t stop trying to please everybody else around you.
4. You self-medicate.
You can’t just have one glass of wine at dinner if you are feeling terribly depressed. Alcohol is a depressant, but it makes you forget about your problems for a little bit. You know this is incredibly unhealthy for you to do, but you can’t help but want to get away from your problems for a night.
5. You cancel plans that you actually want to go to.
Whether it be that wedding you’ve been dying to go to, or that great concert your friends can’t stop raving about, sometimes you won’t be able to handle it and you will cancel. This doesn’t mean you wanted to cancel, but in your mental state, sometimes you need to be alone.
6. You ache everywhere.
Depression just like anxiety, can also cause physical symptoms. Sometimes this mental illness can cause your body to feel like it weighs a ton, and every bone in your body will hurt.
7. You can’t stay awake.
Insomnia is a huge part of mental illnesses, and depression can definitely cause you to have sleeping problems. It also can be hard to stay awake during the day because you have no motivation whatsoever and feel too fatigued to do anything.
8. You eat everything in sight.
Depression can cause you to want to eat ‘your feelings’. When you aren’t feeling good mentally, food can be the only thing that can provide you with comfort when you feel most alone.
9. You lose your appetite.
The opposite can also happen and you could lose the majority of your appetite. With depression, comes a great loss of energy and enthusiasm for participating in activities. Eating may be one of those things.
10. You make your life look perfect on the outside.
You don’t want anyone to worry about you, so you try your hardest to tell your friends you are fine. You do your best to post smiling and cute pictures on your social media channels and you do whatever it takes to not have to be asked, ‘are you depressed?’
11. You cry for no reason.
Sometimes, you wake up with tears rolling down your face. Somedays, you could be happy in an instant and then start to weep the very next second. You constantly think to yourself ‘Why am I sad? Why am I crying? I should be happy’. But, depression is an illness. It can’t be fixed with a cast or a bandaid. It is truly a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it is not your fault. It is never your fault.