That Good Ol’ Fashioned Grey-Area Depression

A couple months back, a young woman asked me how she could delineate between sadness and depression. Did she deserve to call herself “a depressed person”? She wasn’t sure. I told her my personal Depression Litmus Test is when I take a right at sadness and drive straight off a cliff into a sea of I Don’t Care. “I’m less productive, I feel like everything I’m doing is pointless, I stop caring about things I normally would,” I wrote.

It didn’t surprise me that she would second-guess her emotions. Many people have a limited understanding of what depression looks like (so many looks!). And even those of us who do know can still find ourselves competing for legitimacy in the Depression Olympics (sponsored by Twitter, probably). Did I eat enough cheese today? Could my sweatpants use a couple more stains? Does this two-month bender put me in the running for the title? The depression title, of course. Sometimes it feels like it has to be earned, as though simply being depressed isn’t enough. That in owning the title, you also have to own the nebulous persona that comes with it.

But depression isn’t a persona. It’s a mood disorder and an illness, not a uniform one throws on to express their inner turmoil. There are several depressive disorders as outlined by the DSM 5 — add to that subjective life experience and a multitude of mental health variables, and it’s difficult to argue that depression could ever manifest as a one-size-fits-all, grey-scale cloak. Your depression could look very different from someone else’s, different from the archetype — but that doesn’t invalidate it. And that doesn’t make it harmless.

I know this. So why, after moving cross-country to Los Angeles, did it take months of lethargy, apathy, and nihilism for me to recognize what was happening?

The first time I felt depressed… what a funny-sad way to start a sentence. As if I know. I used to have this tidy little depression origin story: things were just swell until the year I turned thirteen. That year, 1999, my family and I abruptly moved from Brooklyn to a suburb of New York City. The move made me aware of a few things: 1) I could not trust my treasonous parents, 2) The only person who mourned my moving away was me, 3) cutting myself was an adequate way to deal with items 1) and 2).