Quiet. Chronic depression is a quiet sort of sickness. You can’t see it. Your body doesn’t disintegrate…you don’t feel stabbing physical pain. It isn’t obvious, you don’t hear voices, you don't have obsessive compulsions, your body isn’t covered in boils. Your life goes on and you keep living. You keep living with it. You think about not living and you see no point in it but you stay alive and somehow you keep going and going.

It’s a quiet thing…it’s like a shadow that follows you around and around but it’s a shadow that lives inside you. Depression becomes a part of you that becomes so normal that your brain patterns change and you become a different person and you don’t even think twice about the way you feel…or the awful, awful thoughts you have that you can’t even bring yourself to say. You don’t say it. You preoccupy yourself with things so that you never have a chance to think about it or it can be so overwhelming that you have a hard time getting out of bed except to do only those things that are absolutely necessary.

Your friends and your family may never even know that you’re sick. You may never even know that you’re sick. But you are sick and you may know damn well but it's so hard to say it. Yeah, you may have a chronic illness but depression isn’t really socially acceptable. It’s uncomfortable. Your sadness would make people uncomfortable. You are uncomfortable and your thoughts are uncomfortable and why are you so sad? Smile! Nobody would treat a cancer patient like that. Instead people question your sickness. You are accused of being self-indulgent, selfish, petty, spoiled, and you are told that you have the ability to get over this and snap out of it. You just don't want to. You just want to feel so sorry for yourself. You should be able to grow up and to snap out of this.

But why can’t I snap out of this? I should really just be able to snap out of this…shouldn’t I? Or haven’t I been trying to snap out of this for six years? It comes and it goes but it always comes back again. Again and again and again. I don’t know if it ever really will go away. I haven’t snapped out of it yet, I haven’t gone crazy and snapped yet. It’s not like that. It's not so obvious. It's a quiet thing.