My experiences with Depression

There are two major players in my life dealing with depression - my mother and my fiancee.

My mother's depression is accompanied by bipolar disorder while my fiancee's is paired with ADHD and an anxiety disorder.

Depression is a hard thing to explain, because I feel like it manifests in different ways. When my mother has a depressive episode, she sleeps locked up on her bedroom and avoiding the world outside of covers. She spends a lot of time snapping at my sister and I, frustrated with us for disturbing her or for acting like we're the adults when we try to take care of her. For my fiancee, though, her depressive episodes revolve around a constant series of naps, a general meanness in conversations because she's upset and frustrated, and a heightened anxiety leading to far more frequent panic attacks that are set off by even the littlest things - like me apologizing with a slightly frustrated voice because I woke her up because all of the lemon curd in the cabinet fell when I was trying to grab food.

The consistency I've noticed between them, though, comes from the destructive force of their depression. It reigns hell on their lives because they can't get up and continue their life, because they walk around feeling so filled with despair and anger that communication and conversation ends up badly, because there are people who matter to them who just don't know how to help them or what they are struggling with. I've seen my parents relationship fall apart because my father can't handle my mother's depression as well as my sister's relationship with our mother. I've seen my fiancee's relationship with her father become strained because he doesn't know how to handle her depression without just telling her to tough it up, even though he's only ever trying to help her.

And the worst thing, I think, about depression is that it comes and goes, making it difficult to admit you need help even when you're sitting at the bottom of the ocean because eventually you'll float to the top and feel perfectly fine again.