Wherein I Start A Slow Clap

If you don't know who The Bloggess is, I feel horribly sorry for you.  She is, hands down, one of the funniest bloggers in the world today (so say at least three people).  She also suffers from depression.  The other day, she wrote a post about depression and, if I wasn't feeling so shitty myself, I would have stood up and cheered.

I really wish that I could print out the following and deliver it to people in my life who don't have a sniff of what life with depression/anxiety/OCD is like...to my neighbours, who likely wonder why I am always home; and to the supervisors and management at work, who probably think I'm just lazy.  Until you've lived it or lived with it, you'll never be able to understand.

The following is taken from The Bloggess's site:

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When cancer sufferers fight, recover, and go into remission we laud their bravery.  We call them survivors.  Because they are.

When depression sufferers fight, recover and go into remission we seldom even know, simply because so many suffer in the dark…ashamed to admit something they see as a personal weakness…afraid that people will worry, and more afraid that they won’t.  We find ourselves unable to do anything but cling to the couch and force ourselves to breathe.

When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate.  Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive.  We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker…but as survivors.  Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it.  Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand.

Regardless, today I feel proud.  I survived.  And I celebrate every one of you reading this.  I celebrate the fact that you’ve fought your battle and continue to win.  I celebrate the fact that you may not understand the battle, but you pick up the baton dropped by someone you love until they can carry it again.  I celebrate the fact that each time we go through this, we get a little stronger.  We learn new tricks on the battlefield.  We learn them in terrible ways, but we use them.  We don’t struggle in vain.

We win.

We are alive.

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