The good days

[Joya]

You know the ironic thing about depression?  It's the really happy days that follow. .. I feel wonderful today,  hopeful even.  But what about the people that I hurt when I couldn't pick up the phone to talk to them? What about the customers that won't come back because I was in such a hopeless state that I couldn't give them the service that they deserved.  Those are the thoughts that remain in my mind in the aftermath of depression.  I feel like a fraud, because I know that it'll return and the cycle will start all over again.  It's so baffling. ...

[CrashCoyote]

Hi Joya, 

I don't think there is a person alive that doesn't have regrets. (Maybe aside from the very young, some mentally ill such as psychopaths – although maybe they do, subject for another day – and those with dementia.) Still, to use an Arabian proverb, "Four things come not back: The spoken word, The sped arrow, The past life, The neglected opportunity." 

No matter how much you dwell on the past, it is done. I guess it is those regrets that help up make better decisions in the future. One of my bosses was talking to me once about life. He said that he saw it like trying to juggle balls. One ball being finances, one being career, one being family, one being hobbies, one being personal health and so on. You get the idea. He said I should think of all of these balls as being made of rubber, except the one around personal health. I should treat that as though it were made of glass. He said that if I dropped one of the rubber balls, it wouldn't break and would bounce back. 

He said if I dropped the personal health one (looking after myself) it would not bounce back and juggling the other balls would become increasingly difficult. I don't mean to wax lyrical and I certainly cannot claim to always prioritise my health, in fact I don't, which is why I think I struggle with other stuff. I just wanted to encourage you to not keep punishing yourself for the things you cannot change and to work on the things you can – your future. 

Kind regards, John.

[JessF]

I think we have to do the best we can to enjoy the good days. There are many things that we "know" will return at some point in our futures: we will most likely get a cold some time over winter, we will eat or drink something that upsets our stomach, we will say the wrong thing at some point and upset someone. Yet these things are not in the forefront of our mind, we accept them as just parts of life and we deal with them as they come up.

There's a lot of talk about the stigma that comes with having depression, but we also put a lot of this on ourselves too, like John has said. 

You're not a fraud, because like all of us, you have good and bad days and those are genuine feelings that are very real for you at the time they are happening. Good friends will understand, and as for customers... well having worked in customer service jobs, I think the ledger is well and truly on the other side with that one. There are far more customers that are rude to people in service without a second thought for their feelings then there are workers who will occasionally be rude back.