Dear friend
Last night, something finally clicked that had never clicked before. I do not have to be ‘the depressed one’, I get it now.
Something that my friends have been trying to tell me for years, and even my therapist, never sank in properly. I guess one of the hardest things you learn in therapy is this very thing. So instead I gave half-assed answers, self-serving replies about “doing better”, and long-winded defensive justifications for why I did what I did.
Last night, a cataclysmic change has altered my entire identity - so profound that it's left me physically shaking still to today.
I have spent my entire life assuming that I am ‘the depressed one’, because I thought that you're only allowed to be one emotion at any one time. As if to feel any positive emotion somehow diminishes or invalidates the years of pain and hurt I've lived through. Because who am I if the rock's gone?
To allow a slither of any moment of happiness felt as to betray the very notion that I am suffering. Laughing at memes, enjoying the taste of a good meal, feeling proud of my work, none of it felt fair because I had lived with the assumption that experiencing any brief window of joy completely erased the pain. But that's not true is it?
Emotions are not mutually exclusive. Experiencing a positive emotion does not - nor must it - equate to “feeling good”. I am allowed to feel both pleasure and pain at the same time.
To put it in programming terms, I have lived my entire life under the assumption that my Emotion value is a constant string literal - defined to be "Depressed". This is who I thought I was and the only thing I thought I was allowed to be. To accept that, even for a moment, I could be anything else (Emotion = "Happy") felt as though I'm denying the sad state of my existence and “pretending” to be cured.
What I learned, oh so suddenly, is that Emotion is not a constant string literal. It's a mutable list of strings. Emotion.Contains("Depressed") and Emotion.Contains("Happy") can both be true, because one need not erase the other. I am allowed to feel both internal conflict and find fleeting moments of peace - the two can co-exist.
The story I've told about myself for my whole life has now changed for the better. If I am allowed to have more than one emotion at the same time (even if those emotions seem to massively contradict each other), then I am not - nor did I ever have to be - “the depressed one”. That is not all I am, that is not all I can be. I am so much more than a mental illness. I am so much more than a single rigid mood. I am a programmer. I am a returning student on a path to fix their life. I love coffee and cats and code and pizza. I am the sum of so much more than the cumulative total of pain I thought I was.
I have had so many friends tell me that I vent and unload constantly, and I did this because I believed I had to reassert my pain - because for as long as I can remember, that has been my identity. “Oh by the way I'm depressed”. “I know you're having a bad day, I'm having a bad day too, remember that about me - that's who I am”. "Don't forget I'm hurting! That's me! See me!". If I can feel both happy and sad at the same time, then that means my identity as ‘the depressed one’ was built on a lie. Why can I not instead be ‘the happy one’, or ‘the one who laughs at memes’, or ‘the computer scientist’, or ‘the wannabe game dev’? These are all equally true and valid descriptors of me - so why the fuck shouldn't I call myself something nicer?
I have finally internalised and accepted one of the biggest seismic shifts in perspective I've had in my whole entire life:
I am so much more than depression. Depression does not define me.
It does not define me.