Through the Wilderness – 7

Chapter Seven

“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him.
~ Ecclesiastes 4: 9-10

All throughout my depression, I found myself being less and less sociable. I just didn’t care to be around people anymore, didn’t care to talk to anyone. In fact, I wanted to get away from everyone. It started with my phone. I suddenly hated talking to people on the phone. Other than quick, “I’ll meet you there in five minutes” phone calls, I didn’t want to use it. I wouldn’t answer when people called. I don’t really even know why I kept paying the bill. That attitude spread toward my internet forms of communication—MySpace and AOL Instant Messenger—which I, up to that point, had used quite often.

Now there were only two or three people I would actually talk to online. I didn’t care about the others. I didn’t want to make small talk. I just wanted to talk to the few with whom I could discuss trivial things, things that weren’t real. (“Okay, obviously Jesus could hit a curve ball, but my question is would He? You think He’d take advantage of His abilities like that?” That conversation lasted probably an hour. I am not even making that up.) I wanted to avoid anything that would make me talk about how I was really feeling.

That was a weird attitude to have during that time. All I wanted to do was get to the bottom of my depression, to figure out what was causing it so I could take care of it, but whenever anyone would ask me anything came even remotely close to that topic, I would deflect it another direction. If I was having a bad day, sometimes I desperately wanted someone to come up and ask about how my day was going so I could talk about it and we could work it out together. But then someone would ask me how my day was going, and I would give a cheery but insincere, “I’m doing fantastic! How are you?” I got really good at redirecting my conversations away from the things that hurt to talk about.

I realize now that this was an extremely unhealthy behavior, but I’m afraid it’s one that many people fighting depression go through. (I’m saying this for the benefit of people with depression—that they might decide to talk about it with someone—not for others to convince them to talk if they say they don’t want to; I don’t think that helps anything.) I say this because I know many people—who I know for a fact are fighting depression—walk around every day talking to others as though nothing is wrong. For a long time, I was one of them. I’m sure many of my friends at the college had no idea I was ever facing anything like this. It wasn’t that they were being bad friends; I just got really good at hiding my pain.

But here is the problem with that: We were made to be communicative beings. God created us in His image—right after He spoke everything in to existence. We were made to talk with God and with other human beings. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us if we don’t always want to be hanging out with other people and talk up a storm or whatever. But it does mean that when we never want to talk to other people—especially about things that affect us so deeply, as depression does—we are fighting against our very nature.

One thing that really helped me to get through my depression was talking to someone who truly understood what I was going through. I became friends with someone through somewhat bizarre circumstances, and for some reason we were able to talk about deep matters rather quickly in our friendship. She had a similar history to mine—each of us growing up with a parent who struggled with depression—and so we didn’t have to explain a lot of the background information, as we would have had to do with other friends. She was also struggling with depression at the same time as me.

I don’t remember much of what was said, but I do know that we talked a lot about our depression. And I’ll tell you what—it felt good to be able to just get my frustrations out without having to explain every little detail or make it comprehensible. I noticed that when you talk about depression with people who have been through it, you can say a lot of things that don’t make any sense at all, but both of you know exactly what you’re talking about; you’ve both been there.

It felt good to get all that stuff off my chest, especially with someone who pretty much already knew everything I was going to say anyway. It was helpful not because I was informing her of anything new, but because now I knew I had someone else who wanted to get through it—someone who could help me to work through it, to process all these emotions I had worked so hard to suppress. I found a friend to help me up after my long fall into depression.

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