What is depression? In common dictionaries it is “severe despondency and dejection, typically felt over a period of time and accompanied by feelings of hopelessness and inadequacy.” In psychological texts it is “a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest.” In media it is a beautiful young person crying softly over lost love or uncaring parents or being misunderstood and making clean, shallow cuts in their pristine pale forearm with a pristine polished razor blade, or smoking cigarettes and writing sad poetry in a notebook with pressed roses. In the end they will be rescued by a newfound lover, or they will take their own life and die quietly and gracefully in a bathtub full of bloody water where their perfect, tragic body will never bloat, never rot, never smell, or as a profound silhouette at the end of a homemade noose. I am not here to tell you about any of these definitions. I am here to tell you what depression is not through any dictionary or textbook or movie, but through the eyes of the victims.

Depression is fatigue, constantly. Your bones will ache, always, no matter what you do with them. It is your teeth itching and your hands shaking and your mouth all chewed up because you have not slept in 27 or 36 or 49 hours, or your head throbbing and your eyes sticking because all you want to do anymore is sleep, sleep through the next day, sleep forever. Your gums will hurt, too, because you have not brushed your teeth. It is being coated in a layer of oil and grime and dried tears because you do not shower anymore. It is your stomach hurting because you cannot bring yourself to get up and eat; maybe you are hoping you can waste away that way. Or it is the feeling of being too full, all the time, because eating is the only way left that you can get any dopamine response, so you have to keep eating so it doesn’t go away too. Or maybe your stomach hurts because you have eaten plastic, or dish soap, or something to punish your body, or maybe somehow make your emotional state corporeal, to validate it. If you’re particularly unlucky, it is all three, in a cycle of purging and binging and punishing, purging, binging, punishing, purging, binging, punishing. Sometimes it is infected cuts on your thighs from when you tried to feel another way, or bruises on your arms from when you finally did feel and it was too much, too much, and you wanted to drown it out with a more manageable, familiar pain.

Depression looks like the face you see in the mirror, like a corpse, someone who has let themselves go, that perpetuates your despair, or worse, the face that still looks healthy, happy, and makes you think, “What is wrong with me? Where is my suffering? Why can’t you see it?” or “Why do I feel so sick? Why does this hurt?” It looks like the garbage accumulating in the corners of your room because you could pick it up, you could, you could scrub down the walls, but the filth is on your body, it’s in your mouth and in your head and it will just come back. It is the homework piling up that you don’t even cry about anymore. Maybe it’s the hole in the wall where you tried to break your own hands, or the innocent-looking drawer where you know you hide your pills or your knife or your lighter or your other tools of shame, your tools of self destruction. It looks like the look of disappointment and disgust and fear in your father’s eyes, or the pain and distress in your mother’s, or the look of uncomfortable lack of understanding that seems to stretch miles and miles and miles from your friends’ eyes to you.

Depression sounds like those same friends talking about you and wondering what happened to you, or your parents pleading with you to come down to dinner, or to smile, or to look at them, just look at them, just look at us, please just look at us! It can also sound like no change at all, because they can’t tell what is happening to you, they can’t even tell. It sounds like the same song, over and over, because it gives you that feeling, until it doesn’t, and then it sounds like silence, hours of silence.

Depression smells like food you used to like, but it’s not the same, it’s bland, washed out, or just a chore now. It smells like the garbage and dirty clothes still accumulating on the floor of your room, on your desk, in your bed, because you’ve given up, you’ve resigned yourself to drowning in filth. It smells like you. Like sour, rancid sweat and traces of urine and some strange hormonal cocktail of hate and despair. Maybe it smells like vomit.

Depression might taste like vomit, too. It tastes, again, like food you used to like. It tastes like that sour, bitter taste of stale emptiness in your mouth, and then it tastes like blood and rot from your teeth and gums because you still haven’t brushed your teeth.

Depression is watching your grades slip. At first you want to do something about it, but you just can’t quite make yourself do it. Then you just don’t care at all. It all seems so trivial, irrelevant, so high up the hierarchy of needs, on a tier you know you won’t get to, one you don’t plan on getting to. It is feeling your friends slip away from you. It is watching them losing interest in you and moving away quietly, not looking at you, and you’d like to stop them, but why should you move? Why should you speak? What’s the point? It is feeling yourself drifting away from them and seeing the hurt in their eyes, hearing them asking you why, pleading with you to come back, and you want to, you really do, but you’re just so tired, and if they go you can sleep for longer. Soon you realize that you don’t care about them anymore. It is watching your parents grow sick with worry, sick with pain, if they aren’t oblivious, and you feel guilt this time, it hurts, and you find yourself wishing that you could stop caring about them too. Depression is watching yourself turn ugly, your friends turn ugly, your parents turn ugly, every face in the crowd, even the faces you used to admire. Then all the trees, and the buildings, and the air, and the sky, and the world are ugly. All the songs and the art are ugly too. You hate them all. You hate everything, to the point of sickness sometimes. You are bored, so hopelessly bored, but even when it drives you to get out of bed nothing satiates it, and worse, you start thinking and you find you can’t imagine something that will satiate it, possible or impossible, real or abstract. Despair, and in despair, absolute despair in every facet of life, you find a horrible sort of relief from stress or anxiety, all those sicknesses of caring. Issues of the future don’t matter now, because you don’t have a to have a future. You can leave at any time. Depression is seeing suicide as your failsafe. Sometimes, depression is loving something meaningless, a movie, or a band, loving it more than life because the closest thing you have to love now is that tiny rush that for whatever reason this meaningless thing still gives you. It is setting new goals, and the goals go 1. Seeing that band you love, 2. Dying. Depression is being tired again, all the time, even when you’re asleep, and knowing sleep won’t do it, it’s a different kind of rest you want, and sleep isn’t substitute anymore, and the goals you had yesterday can no longer hold you over. Depression is making plans again. Planning your escape. It is hating yourself for being weak when you cannot carry them out. Depression is hating your own mother because it is your promise to her keeping you here, and she is the one thing you care about enough to stay. Sometimes depression is attempting those plans. Sometimes it is succeeding. Sometimes it is not.

So many think of depression as overwhelming sadness. It is not. It is not the presence of sadness, but the absence of happiness, any happiness, even the tiny chemical happiness that rewards you for eating. It is losing the ability to feel happiness. It is losing it for so long that you cannot imagine being happy again. You cannot remember being happy, either.

It is not having a bad day. It is not a mood. It is a chronic illness. It is not black. It is perpetual grey. It is not something love can rescue you from. Your loving parents cannot save you, or your loving friends. No knight in shining armour can save you. Depression is not a matter of external circumstances, it is a chemical imbalance. Sometimes it was a situational thing in the beginning. Maybe it never was and you looked in the mirror and hated yourself for your weakness, because your life is perfect, you have no excuse, you have no reason to hurt, you don’t deserve to let yourself hurt. It is not simple. You will not understand it. No one will. It is not romantic. It is not poetic. It is not beautiful. It is bitter and hateful and dirty and pathetic and ugly. The movies don't show you lying in bed for days, to lazy to even bathe, doing nothing. And what it shows is a romanticized caricature. The tears are not delicate on your clear skin, they are acidic and salty on your raw, red, blotchy cheek. The cuts are not fine and clean, they are jagged and oozing and infected, and your blood is not vibrant, passionate red, it is dead rusty brown. There is nothing graceful about taking your own life. When they find you hanging there your bowels will have released, or when they find you in the bathtub your face will be bloated and you will smell like rot. The silhouette of the hanging in front of the window will be dripping urine, and the face in the water will be swollen and grey. People won’t see the poetry, they’ll just smell the stink. It is not tragedy. It is not romance. It is just ugly. It is boring, really.

In my life, depression is like a grey haze over my freshman year and the surrounding time. Depression is the reason my grades for that year are useless, like Ii wasn’t even there. It is the reason i might not be able to raise my GPA enough to pursue the college options i would like. Depression is the worst thing i ever did to my mother and father. I’ve felt a fraction of their pain now. Depression has also been a lesson in human illness. It is why I now appreciate the little things in life, like the taste of good food, or a funny joke, or enjoying a TV show. You may look at me and my life, my messy house, my unhealthy diet, my antisocial habits, my disorganization, laziness, poor sleep habits and criticize me, but I am doing WELL for me. My house is a mess, but at least I can keep my body clean. I do eat unhealthily, but at least I eat. I do seldom seek out social interaction, but I have friends that I see as more than painful commitments. I am disorganized, but I care about my schooling. I am lazy, but I have the will to live again. I sleep strange hours, too little or too much, but I have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Unless you've been there too, you cannot imagine how far I have had to crawl out of the depths of despair and apathy to get to the level that is your default. So many things you take for granted I have had to work for: Self-worth, everyday happiness, occasional contentment, the ability to sit alone with my thoughts for a moment and not be reduced to tears, the right to truthfully say that yes, I do, I DO want to live. Depression is something I will always have to fear and fight against. Depression is a place in which I hope I never find myself again.