Nettle Briar @Ulfra_Wolfe@awoo.space

I gotta love the 80s aesthetic

why isnt the world softer >:(

I'm not sorry.

Sending out wolf hugs! (Artist is Ribnose, Solus is me, Amber is hers)

@Ulfra_Wolfe

It's hard to describe the experience of depression because it's not the same for everyone. If you're trying to inform people what it's like (as opposed to just getting them to sympathise with your immediate, direct, right-now feelings or lack thereof), I think it isn't wise to TRY to describe the details. I think it's better to call it really vague things and not define it with specific emotions or attitudes. Even if you have to resort to characterising it as "a really unokay level of feeling bad", that vagueness is an important part of what it is.

Because naming specifics ends up defining, in people's minds, this overly-specific set of feelings, and then the actual experience is unrecognizable. The general descriptions floating around *from most depressed people* of how it makes you feel do not match my own experience at all, which is why mine went unrecognized and untreated for over a decade. I had been told "depression isn't bad feelings, it's a lack of feeling" so many times that I kept trying to explain to my friends, "I'm not depressed, I just wish I hadn't been born because it hurts too much."

"I can't be depressed," I told myself, "because depressed people don't care about anything and have no energy and don't want to do anything. Therefore," I reasoned, "if I'm in a state of acute emotional anguish 24/7, I'm feeling something different, and it's probably real and correct and inescapable. And I don't mind getting out of bed and going through the motions, because it doesn't matter if I do or not, and it's easier to not resist and just do what I'm expected to do. So this doesn't look like... and then this doesn't either... and then I react to that differently..."

I've spoken with probably hundreds of people who have been depressed, and only two or three of them had an experience that was *recognizable* as the same experience I had. (It seems to occur in Highly Specific Circumstances.) It doesn't even share many things in common with the "typical case" except sadness, futility, helplessness-- some very unspecific feelings that manifested, and were dealt with, by me in ways drastically and unrecognizably different from most people's descriptions.

I think that if you start getting into things like "no, depression is this feeling/attitude/etc" maybe they will gain a superficial understanding that you feel crummy when you have those feelings. But it won't help them deeply understand you, and won't even be accurate, and could result in them running over future depressions (theirs or someone else's) with "no, that's not what depression is, so you must be fine (and all your bad feelings must be objectively correct)"... And all you'll accomplish is this very superficial understanding that you are going through a mysterious "bad time" that they are unable to feel as akin to what they know of lived experience, but that they should probably tiptoe around when they can figure out HOW, for which they have no guide but some unrelatable reactions you've described to them that they can only TRY to identify on sight, unfamiliar as they are.

And really, is this narrow misimpression even a good tradeoff for immediate sympathy? I suspect possibly not, because their understanding of how you feel has been funneled into shallower impressions than what is really bad about them. Maybe your friend now thinks, "Okay, you have X symptom and for some reason, some intuitive leap that I don't share, this is acutely distressing to you." Then they're viewing it as an alien curiosity they don't understand. But you could describe it both more vaguely and more intensely if you back up into things that are general.

This is why we have vague and extreme words. This is why we have language like "hopeless" and "feels unending" and "trapped". They're not specific reactions to stimuli that your friends might either relate to or find bizarre/counterintuitive. They're descriptions that convey why the reactions are a PROBLEM for you, which others may be better able to relate to a time when something (potentially the complete opposite situation!) was a PROBLEM for them. Or, if they don't relate, if they've never been depressed, then it indicates the seriousness of the matter. Don't be afraid to use this extreme language, okay, because this is what extreme language is really *for*.

We have clinicised depression and the like so much, maybe in order to make it easier for people to accept a diagnosis without thinking that it is too extreme to be really true of them. We have made it easier for people to accept it as a common illness they might actually turn out to have, rather than something that "doesn't happen to real people they know". But in so doing, we've watered it to the point where people possibly just think it's no big deal. It's like if we had to warn about a tuberculosis epidemic, but instead of "oh shit, some of my friends have tuberculosis and that's seriously unokay", we produced this attitude of "tuberculosis? That's just like a cold, right?" They are not going to face the fact that something is serious and scary AND also very real and present around them. The more serious they believe it is, the harder it is for them to reconcile that with their mental picture of the world not being that ~extreme~.

But if you outright use the language that marks it as extreme, if you prevent them from turning the idea of depression into "not as big of a deal as I thought it was", then ... not only would they have to stop shrinking your experience into smaller conceptions (because you can't shrink "enormous" into "not that big"), but also quit labelling very specific symptoms that are just the way an illness is being reacted to, rather than what it is.

To define "depression" as a condition that "makes you feel like X" is like describing "falling in love" as a condition that "makes you want to dance and sing." It might. It might not. Dancing and singing might mean a different thing to your listener. They may not understand at all. But while they're forced to shove that "symptom" into whatever it means, or can mean, in their own experience, they have to take a super extreme description like "unbearably excited/intense abt this person" at face value, whether they have ever felt what that experience means or not.

Granted, it might be an awkward time/place to explain such serious conditions to people. In which case it's really not going to be solved by overdefining the condition anyway, because if they did understand how the symptom makes you feel then it's too much for the time/place, and if they don't they won't feel sympathy because they don't get it. So... if you want this person to sympathise, you may just have to resort to saying things that sound emo and dramatic... even if they sound emo and dramatic... because what you're trying to tell them is, in actual fact, emo and dramatic. Nobody can or should expect you to tell serious news in a way that allows it to sound unserious.