Hi josh88
My heart goes out to you as you try and manage such a deeply depressing time in your life. I think sometimes we can be managing to the best of our ability while people don't necessarily realise or understand how limited our abilities can be under the circumstances, based on a variety of reasons. It can be a challenge for all (our self included) to realise that what we actually need is a pat on the back for managing as well as we do.
I think sometimes it can be of some relief to speak with others who can relate to our circumstances or how we feel. For example, while you could have every happy person around you questioning as to why you can't help but bring everyone down with your mood, someone who feels the same challenges as you could easily say 'How depressing is it to be around seriously happy people, who can't relate to how tough it is to enter social situations at times?! How challenging is it to actually be in a room full of people you resent and maybe even hate (strong word) to some degree because you just can't feel as happy as them?! How guilty do you sometimes feel when you think 'I wish they could all experience how depressed I feel. I wish they felt as angry and/or as sad as me''. Sometimes it can feel like a huge relief when someone raises issues we can actually relate to. It kind of becomes a matter of 'It's not just me. I'm not alone in how I feel'.
Josh, sometimes it's just not enough for people we know to sit back and simply hope we're not too depressed. That kind of silent hope gets us nowhere. Sometimes 'tough love' doesn't work either. When someone says 'You gotta get it together and get on with life and stop feeling sorry for yourself', what they can be overlooking is what that kind of sorrow's really about (perhaps us grieving for some lost sense of self). Maybe what we really need at times is guidance and/or the kind of revelation that's going to open our mind to something we're desperate for or maybe at times we need someone to simply acknowledge 'Life is s**t sometimes, it really is. Let's get through this s**t together'.
Being someone who's managed ins and outs of depression over the years, if there's one thing I'm typically grateful for, it's someone who wonders with me. We could spend weeks, years or even decades wondering why we feel the way we do, while doing all that wondering alone. When we have someone who wonders with us, someone who opens their mind (and in turn opens ours) when it comes to why we're so down, sad, angry, lost, confused etc, that's the kind of wonder that leads to change. I think when someone wonders with us, they raise us in a number of ways (raising our feelings, our level of consciousness, our spirits and our sense of self worth). There's nothing quite like wonderful people.
