This piece was originally performed live for You Are Not Alone: An Uplifting Show About Depression, but given that we are all now, collectively, deep in the shit, I thought it would be appropriate to share.
- Try a mindful breathing exercise. Remember that even if you are very bad at everything else in your life, you can still breathe.
- Be gentle with yourself when you end up criticizing how you breathe. Who knew someone could be so bad at a process that happens automatically for most people? You can try to breathe again later.
- When you find yourself ruminating over all the ways you’ve let yourself, your family, your friends, and your community down — stop. Focus on something present in the space you’re in to ground yourself. The mascara streaks on your pillow will do. Notice their splotchy shape, the way your tears have smudged them into the wrinkles of your white pillowcase that’s really more of a gray than a white at this point.
- Don’t get mad when your roommate cleans your entire room without your permission and even goes so far as to change your bedsheets. He put some fancy-ass bedsheets on your bed and removed the dirty dishes you hadn’t touched in a week. Sure, this is an overstep of boundaries but it’s also the first time you can see your floor in a month so let it go. Roll around in your new shark-print sheets that you’d never be able to afford on your own.
- When you ultimately fill your newly cleaned room with dirty dishes again, but you can’t bring yourself to wash them, just throw them away. Consider them a sunk cost. Order some paper plates and disposable utensils online. You never actually have to do dishes again. Just try to throw these out when you’re done with them.
- Find ways to feed yourself, even when you don’t want to eat.
- If that means watching prison recipes on YouTube that you can make in less than 3 minutes, go ahead and make some prison pad thai using instant ramen and peanut butter and a taco bell hot sauce packet as long as it means you’ll actually eat something that day.
- At some point, you may find yourself trying out a prison burrito recipe you saw that requires you to take a bag of Doritos, crush the Doritos still in the bag, crush a bag of ramen, pour the crushed and uncooked ramen into the bag of Dorito crumbs, pour water into the bag, swish it around so it’s all mixed up, drain the water from the bag, and then roll up your bag of soggy Dorito and ramen mix into the shape of a burrito. After that sits on your kitchen counter for 5 hours, and it’s ready for you to unwrap and pretend it’s a burrito, recognize that you’ve gone too far. Find other ways to feed yourself.
- Stock up on a month’s worth of Soylent. Sure, it’s not even solid food, but it’s better for you than the prison burrito you were going to eat.
- Put some effort into your appearance. Sometimes a change on the outside can mean a change on the inside. Start by brushing your hair. If that’s too much, just put on a beanie to hide your mess of hair. Now you can pretend your blank expression is just one part of an I-couldn’t-care-less look instead of just you feeling dead inside.
- When a concerned friend comes by to check up on you, do not hide under a heap of blankets on your bed out of shame. He knows you’re there. You might think that you’re being really stealthy, but the human-shaped lump on your bed gives you away. Next time, come up with a better hiding spot than one that a 3-year-old might come up with.
- Go to your daily outpatient therapy sessions even when you don’t think they’re helping. At least they’re at the same time every day and give you the structure you desperately need since you dropped out of college and stopped working due to your depression.
- Pour out the tequila bottle you’ve been nursing in bed. You might think that drinking in bed will make the rest of your habits more justifiable because now you can blame your depression on your drinking, but you don’t need an excuse for your depression. That’s not how depression works.
- At your lowest point, after a night of heavy drinking, when you are inches away from suicide, check yourself into a hospital instead. Go to the ER, even if you’re not sure how this works. At the very least, a nurse will hook you up with an IV — and even if you drank an amount of alcohol that would kill a german shepherd, thanks to the IV, you won’t even have a hangover the next day. By tomorrow, the worst of your suicidal urges will have passed, and your friends will wonder how you’re miraculously the only one who’s not hungover. Win-win.
- Write down all the sad things that you get up to when you’re dealing with a major depressive episode. Maybe one day, you’ll share this list with an audience and maybe it’ll be funny to you or healing or both. Know that there’s something past the isolated fuzzy haze of despair you’re in and that you won’t always have to feel this way. Keep this list for next time.
If this gets to be too much, please remember that you are not alone.
If you are not deep in the shit but have figured out how to tread the shit or even float above the shit, please consider advocating for those trapped in jails or prison while this pandemic is happening.
