cowboy emoji

People have many fundamental misunderstandings of depression and believe that alleviating the person of responsibilities will be helpful - being "gentle" with them, saying it's okay to use baby wipes instead of taking a shower, or that it's fine to Doordash spaghetti or lay in bed and avoid social engagements. This would make sense if depression was a bodily disease like cancer, and the symptoms could be alleviated with rest. But it's not. Depression is a disease of the mind. It's a disease of fundamental misattribution. It usually worsens under conditions of rest. Everytime you tell yourself that you're too tired or sick to make yourself spaghetti and need to Doordash, the depression grows stronger. The depression wants to survive even if it kills you (in fact, the ultimate goal is to kill you) and will encourage you to give up. That you will find relief in giving up. But you never will. You will only continue to feel worse and worse. Relief can only be found in doing the hard thing, in giving yourself tasks to accomplish that make you proud to be alive, in boiling the water and chopping the tomatoes for the sauce, in turning toward the light even when your mind is screaming for you to hide under the covers. A lot of people won't tell you this, because they've never been to the darkness and had to crawl back. They don't understand it. They don't realize their sympathy is permission to drown.