... one that looms over a person with this feeling of an impending doom. Some days it's brought on by nothing. Other days, it's simply made worse by the stress of daily life. It isn't something there's a cure for. It isn't something one can just wish away or ignore.
Depression can make things you once cared a lot about seem like pointless ventures. It will sap one's desire to eat, to be productive, or to care for those around them. It will destroy all sense of self. Depression will make one not care about the fact that they haven't showered in days, and creates a vicious desire for anything that might make it go away, even for a couple hours.
Depression is a mental illness, not a state of being. A depressed person can seem almost "happy" on the surface at times, but the storm is still underneath, biting at one's self-confidence. It can destroy relationships with others. It can ruin careers. It can kill...
Depression is a constant struggle, and it's fought one day at a time, because planning the future becomes impossible when one can't care what it holds. It is made much harder by people who don't understand it for what it is. Some seem to think depression is just someone being in a bad mood, and that all they need to do is get over it. I'm here to tell you it doesn't work that way. One can be in an amazing place in life, with nothing to be "upset" about, and feel the pangs of depression.
It's often taken personally by loved ones when seemingly nothing can be done to improve the mood of the depressed. This, again, is a misunderstanding of what depression actually is. It's often a literal chemical imbalance that prevents one from processing the regular "feel good" drugs a normal brain produces, and pharmeceuticals often just hide the symptoms.
Depression is a terrible feeling, but it's one that many of us have learned to live with and adapt to. Thank you very much for reading this. I just had to get some words out into the world. I feel a tiny bit better now...