Running From Depression

I wonder if I will always be running from depression.

Depression was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I didn't even have it that bad.

I was able to get out of bed. I could work and hold friendships and generally exist in the world. What I couldn't do was enjoy any of it.

It was an empty, destructive time in my life. The memory of it still scares me so much. It jabs into my side like a cowboy's spurs and keeps me running away from that feeling.

I tried everything to get over depression. I exercised. I dieted. I expanded my interests. I saw several doctors.

After endless soul-searching, I went on anti-depressants and found out they worked amazingly. But that wasn't good enough. Sporadically, I'd go off them and see if I was still depressed. Usually I was.

The last time seems to have worked. I've been off anti-depressants for ten months, and I have been happier than at any time in my life.

I'm still running, though. I'm still scared. I am so sure depression is lurking just around the corner, waiting to envelope my life, and I will be helpless to stop it. None of my tricks will work.

If that happens, I will go back on anti-depressants and eventually feel fine. But - for as much as I know there is NO stigma to taking pills, that they are a Godsend - I will know that depression has beaten me again. Just because it could.

Because of this, I am relentless in how fast, how passionately, how energetically I run from depression.

I stay in shape. I eat well. I wake up and think good thoughts. I get on the subway and think good thoughts. I look for the good in everything, especially myself. I search for the good side of 15-degree days and 95-degree days in the city. And I go to sleep thinking good thoughts.

This is exhausting. It makes me genuinely happy, but it drains me. It is the only way I want to live, but so much of it is motivated by fear. I do not ever want to begin the slippery slide back to where I was.

I'm scared that if I stop thinking positively all the time, that if I just do it once in a while, I will become like most people seem to be: bitter, bored, unappreciative, just generally underwhelmed with being alive.

And I'm scared that if I am not relentless about thinking positive and being happy, I will fall back into my own Hell, which is ten times worse than the common affliction I just described.

So I turn happiness into a full-time job. There are certainly worse things than being happy all the time. But I wish I could relax just an inch without the fear that depression will take a mile, and then keep taking until I have disappeared.