mental health

depression vs. sadness: the power of mincing words

"When you're depressed, nothing matters. When you're sad, everything does."
- Gloria Steinem, via @spiver, aka Susan Spiver, author of The Wisdom of a Broken Heart

"So you're feeling a sense of hopelessness," the therapist said to me.
"No, I'm feeling despair," I clarified.
"Same thing. You're feeling hopeless," she came back.
"Nooo, I don't feel it's hopeless, I'm experiencing despair. I feel disheartened, but there's still hope here," I said.
"Hope and despair are pretty similar," she said.
"Look it up." I shrugged. "I'm going with despair."

(We didn't last too long as therapist/patient.)

I relish in semantics ("the meaning, or an interpretation of the meaning, of a word.") The more you know about the true definition of a word, the more powerful it is when you speak it. Precision is power.

Depressed and Sad are two very powerful, similar, misappropriated words. Portal words. Sacred words. And if we look more closely at them, we can claim what's true for ourselves and set about transforming depression and sadness into their contrasting states.

Sadness hurts but it signals that you are very, very much alive.
Depression may be the cousin of sadness, sometimes the defended response to unyielding sadness, but it makes you feel anything but alive. It dulls, weighs, and messes with your memory of your true essential nature -- which is that of joy.

I've been through wrenching heart breaks. I've left a decade-long relationship that is still intertwined with my DNA; been devastated by betrayal in business; said goodbye to overseas love that was doomed from the magical start. I've cried those guttural cries that dying animals make, I've canceled meetings because grief caught me off guard en route. I moved arthritically, lugging my heart in a wagon, to get groceries and tend to life on the surface. And through it all, I've felt undeniably, and intensely alive. And this, this is sadness. Acute, sometimes enduring, but always sensory and evocative, sadness.

When you're sad, you're feeling. Sometimes, more than you want to. You wish you could be despondent, but the sadness is sharp and it bleeds your attention from you.

Depression -- a term our med-happy nation uses much too glibly -- dulls one's feelings. Where sadness makes you feel raw and skinless, depression is like wearing a snow suit and mittens and wondering why you can't feel the caress of life. Sadness strips you. As I was just reminded, "Sadness is so f--king cleansing." Depression is muddy and muffling and numbing.

Depression vs. Sadness
Each comes with different gifts, challenges and assignments
Each is a sacred state. Both divine and brutal.
But not the same.
When you respect the difference, you're closer to the cure.

. . . . . . .

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how to be depressed

"Depression was, indeed, the hand of a friend trying to press me down to the ground on which it was safe to stand--the ground of my own truth, my own nature with its complex mix of limits and gifts, liabilities and assets, darkness and light."
- Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

I don't think I've ever been "clinically" depressed. Well, maybe I have, but it certainly didn't feel clinical. It felt morbid, cosmic, and unavoidably essential. When I was thirteen, my parents split for the umpteenth and final time and a few months later, my dad brought it to my attention that I'd been wearing the same hockey jersey for weeks and that I needed to start doing the dishes again. I was definitely depressed.

And there was the dark night after Magic Man flew back to London and the apartment felt like a keyless heartbreak hotel with barred windows. But my last extended dark night was about ten years ago. It was a new depth of crushing aloneness. Another break up, this time with Hot-but-Needy Actor Man in LA (I was equally needy, duh,) which triggered an exorcism of self doubt and psychic bile that, being thirty-something and ambitious, I just needed to get out of my system. {Note: it's often not the actual loss that causes the depression - it's all the crap that's tied up in it that you needed to deal with anyway.}

In that spell of depression I wore the same pair of butt-ripped Levi's for weeks. I'd lie in my backyard at two in the morning in nowhere New Mexico, smoking Marlboro's, looking up at the stars, wondering about the fatality of scorpion bites, and praying for aliens to abduct me. {Not joking in any way.} I cried every single day, sometimes twice a day, for weeks. I felt profoundly unheard...empty. As I'd fall asleep I felt as though chunks of my being were decomposing into the bed. It was a brutal ordeal of the psyche, but I knew I was being reborn. I did have faith that whatever new face was emerging, she would eventually smile back at me.

I learned a thousand subtle and mighty things about Life from those existential passages, but what I learned about depression itself is that, the more you resist it, the longer it lasts. When depressed, I find it's best to just be...depressed. Happiness returns more quickly when you give yourself permission to be blue...or any shade of black you need to be. (more...)