Geoffrey MillerVerified account

16/ Sometimes, I would wake up, crawl to my basement (walking was too much) and cry for like 3-5 hours straight. And then sleep in the corner. Wake up and cry for 2 more hours. In those bouts of depression, even a 20 minute reprieve is like paradise.

17/ Temporarily, I found some relief watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, which is why I am so fond of the show to this day (it's also quite good). But, that relief was ephemeral. And the depression would come back.

18/ In my own experience, medicine is unhelpful. I've read the literature, and there is still a great deal of debate about SSRIs and other pharmacological interventions. I don't want to recommend anything one way or the other. But, I will say that the side effects are awful.

19/ The medicines *are* addictive. And the efficacy is dubious. One has to wait out the beast. And try in the meantime to maintain sanity. In some stages, that means watching a comedy, talking to a friend, reading a poem.

20/ In others, it means staying in bed. One thing that really helped me is reading biographies of other people who had suffered from depression. It's comforting to know that other people have felt the full force of the darkness and have been productive.

21/ When you touch the darkness, it changes you though. It changed a lot for me. It shocked me out of a naive optimism about life. I was a very happy high schooler. And when I first went through depression, I started to realize how much pain some humans feel.

22/ It was horrifying. I used to think a lot about the pain that a person who committed suicide must have went through. I read Darkness Falls Fast by Jamison, and I was shocked at the amount of suffering in the world. That even one mind could experience depression is too much.

23/ There's no way to quantify that suffering. And I honestly wouldn't wish depression on my worst enemy. It's the cruelest thing I can imagine. And I can imagine some very cruel things.