Dylan Morrison | Vox

I handled holiday orders at a grocery store. Trust me: The holidays are miserable.

2020-12-04T10:47:50-05:00

Working at a grocery store during the holiday season is a glimpse at the profound misery this time inspires. | ArtMarie/Getty Images

If you’ve ever worked in retail, you already know what I’m about to tell you: Around the end of October, a sense of horror begins to build that has nothing to do with Halloween. As the days grow shorter and the wind grows colder, coworkers begin to whisper to each other, “Are you ready?” The piped-in music changes, the decor shifts, everyone — regardless of their place in the corporate hierarchy — takes on the grim affect of people bracing themselves for the worst: The holidays are coming.

I’m not sure what it is about the holidays that makes so many people behave so horribly. Maybe it’s the pressure to make the day perfect, or the stress of dealing with one’s family. At this point, I’d be unsurprised to learn that Christmas music activates some kind of dormant aggression impulse.

This year’s holiday season promises to be even more intense for service workers, particularly those in the grocery industry. As the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, people are more stressed than ever and are experiencing fewer moments of kindness and joy to temper their worst impulses. It’s one reason why this year, as someone who has worked through every holiday season for essentially a decade, I urge everyone to stay at home. You might think of the holidays as a wonderful time, a time when people come together and celebrate love, happiness, and joy. But I know the truth. The holidays get ugly.

Two years ago, I was plucked from my position in the deli department of a high-end grocery retailer to be part of the small team that managed our store’s holiday orders. A year later, having proven myself capable of keeping my head no matter how absurd the customer behavior became, I was put in charge of the program. Both years, I worked impossibly hard from the first week of November until Christmas Day, answering questions, taking orders, solving problems, and encountering countless people who, in a sort of holiday-driven derangement, had utterly forgotten how to behave in front of others.

I have been screamed at over pumpkin pies and Yule logs; I have watched grown men weep over the size of their rib roasts; I have been cussed out by a woman who believed her fresh raw turkey, still in its clearly labeled package, was a large chicken with which I was trying to trick her. I have seen people come to blows over the last box of turkey-shaped butter, and witnessed a breakup started by the simple question, “Green beans or green bean casserole?” I have had to explain to at least four separate people that the reason their turkey didn’t taste good is because they put it in the oven without taking the plastic wrapping off.

My favorite holiday story, the one I used to tell at parties in the days when parties were still safe to attend, is this one: Three days before Thanksgiving, a woman came in and demanded to place an order for Thanksgiving Day. I explained to her that we were past the cut-off point for ordering, but she insisted that she needed accommodation and couldn’t possibly pull off a proper meal in three days’ time. I took pity on her, moved some things around, and forced through an order for a pre-cooked dinner for six. “Can I pick the food up hot on Thanksgiving?” she asked, and I explained, as patiently as I could, that we were filling more than 1,000 orders and just didn’t have the facilities to allow for any food to be picked up hot. It clearly wasn’t her dream scenario, but we agreed that her husband would come pick up her order, cold, two days before the holiday.

On Thanksgiving Day, two days after her husband picked up her order, she called me. In a voice so loud I had to hold the phone an inch away from my ear, she screamed, “My food is cold!” I’m not sure how she imagined the food would be hot when she removed it from her own refrigerator, but she yelled at me for 10 more minutes before eventually hanging up on me.

Perhaps I should have suggested she share the holidays with another customer who hated the thought of properly reheating his already cooked food: the man who wanted instructions for how to reheat a precooked prime rib in his microwave. When I, carefully, informed him that microwaving his prime rib (a cut of meat for which he paid more than $100) would never yield any positive results, he demanded, “So what am I supposed to do, turn on my oven?”

Still more frustrating were the people who placed enormous orders and simply abandoned them, fully paid, at our store. An order of four sushi trays was left to languish on Thanksgiving Day; at Christmas, a customer sent me straight to voicemail when I called to inquire as to why he had not come to get the five pounds of shrimp cocktail he’d purchased weeks before. (I’m grateful to that one — the shrimp were delicious.)

Then there were the emotionally fragile customers who were clearly going through it back at home. My booth was set up where we usually kept the cheapest wine we sold and, that season, no fewer than five people came by and burst into tears when they saw that I was there instead. One poor guy came in on Thanksgiving and told me that his wife had a baby last week and that she and her sister had a fight that had been brewing for 10 years and now he and she were uninvited from dinner. “She’s crying. A lot. Please … I need a turkey.” (I managed to find him one.)

But the holidays are going to be different for many of us this year. As Covid-19 cases climb across the nation, the pandemic has recast our traditions of gathering with family as deadly, dangerous events that are best avoided. I know how much that hurts, especially in such a difficult time. We all want a little normalcy. We all want a little joy.

But there is one group of people for whom the holidays are always, always terrible: service workers. Every year, we see the worst of humanity. Every year, we are treated as though we are worthless, as though we are less than people. We work on Thanksgiving, on Christmas, on New Year’s Eve and Day, getting screamed at and belittled while you make fond memories of family togetherness and love. Despite our unfairly low pay, our terrible or nonexistent health insurance, and our desire to be with our own families, we paste on a smile, take your abuse, and help you anyway, because that is our job, and we don’t have any other choice.

I am no longer working at the grocery store where I put in so much of my time and effort (I am high-risk for Covid-19 and decided against it this year). But my friends who are on the front lines of the holiday rush say things have been impossibly difficult this year. People are still ordering holiday dinners, although this year, the hot item is the smallest possible turkey rather than the large ones folks used to fight over in years gone by. The cognitive dissonance those workers are experiencing — being taken to task over the size of a turkey while worrying if their exposure to the public means they won’t live to see another holiday season — sounds unbearable.

Stay home for the holidays this year. It’s not only the right thing to do for your own safety, the safety of your family, and the safety of every American; it’s also the only way to protect the service workers who have suffered many terrible holiday seasons and will inevitably suffer many more. And if you find yourself out and about, then please: Be kind to every service worker you meet, wherever you meet them. As hard as this year’s holiday season has been for you, it has almost certainly been even worse for them. They’ve likely been working day in and day out at constant risk of exposure, unable to afford to take time off, absorbing the frustration and aggression of customers who are struggling, too.

Working on the holiday order team in years past wasn’t all bad. I still think fondly of Elizabeth, a regular customer of mine, who, a few days before Christmas, slipped me a $25 gift card and thanked me for all my hard work. I also helped a new grandfather last year, a warm and wonderful man who was trying to make an early Thanksgiving work as his daughter, son-in-law, and newly born grandson would be out of state on the actual holiday. I was able to pull together a full dinner for him well before the bulk of our Thanksgiving food was set to arrive, and a few days later, he came back into the store just to thank me and show me photos of the wonderful holiday they’d been able to pull together with my help. Moments like that almost made the horror stories feel worth it — that is, until the screaming inevitably started back up.

So give service workers the gift of kindness — or really, just decency — this holiday season. I promise you it will come as a welcome surprise.

Dylan Morrison is a writer based in Cleveland, Ohio. His work focuses primarily on trans rights, food, and being kind to service workers. He is also the author of the novel Juniper Lane (2016). You can find him on Twitter at @dylan_thyme.

9 things I wish people understood about anxiety

2020-09-16T15:26:48-04:00

About five years ago, I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. This did not come as much of a surprise to me, since for the previous two decades, I had spent my time freaking out about any number of things. Some of my fears were rational, and some were less so, but all of them had one thing in common: they had a level of control over me and my day-to-day life that fell outside the range of normalcy.

Since then, I’ve expended a lot of energy working out the best ways to manage my anxiety. As with most endeavors, there have been some successes, some failures, the occasional moment of unintentional hilarity, and — by the very nature of the beast — a few panic attacks. I like to think that these days, I pretty much know the ropes. But if there’s one thing I could change, it’s not the anxiety itself, nor even the ease and availability of treatment. It’s how often I find myself in tense, uncomfortable, or painful situations with people who just want to help; it’s how often I find myself thinking, “Man, this whole thing would be so much easier if you just understood a little more about anxiety.”

So, without further ado, here are the top nine things I wish I could magically make the whole world understand about anxiety and those who live with it.

1) Anxiety does not move in a straight line

For folks who move through life without an anxiety disorder, I imagine fear and panic as emotions that are pretty straight-forward: something happens, or is projected as going to happen, that causes an apprehensive or frightened response. But for a person with an anxiety disorder, things don’t work that way. Perhaps this is best illustrated by example. Let’s think of something minor — like, say, losing your car keys. That would of course be frustrating for anyone. A person without anxiety might think something along the lines of, “Oh no, what a hassle!,” or maybe even, “Oh no, this is going to screw things up for me for a few days!” But for someone with anxiety? Well, that train of thought might look more like this: “Oh no, my car keys are gone! What if I don’t find them? What if I try to get them replaced but it’s not possible or it takes forever and something happens and I need my car and I can’t get in it? What if the thing that happens is that I need to drive someone to the hospital? What if that person is my best friend? What if they’re dying and the only way to get them to a hospital is my car and my keys are still gone? Oh, god, I LOST MY CAR KEYS AND NOW MY BEST FRIEND IS GOING TO DIE AND IT’S ALL MY FAULT.”

This brings me fairly neatly to my second point:

2) Anxiety is not rational, and boy, do we know it

Like, seriously, I promise you: we know. You really cannot spend all day every day listening to the thoughts of an anxious person and not know that a large portion of those thoughts make approximately no sense at all. Just last week, I found myself worrying that my parents would look at the person I was and decide they hated me, despite knowing to the depths of my soul that is not something that would ever occur. This is one of the most frustrating things about having an anxiety disorder: knowing as you’re freaking out that there’s no reason to be freaked out, but lacking the ability to shut the emotion down. A therapist of mine once compared it to having a faulty alarm system wired into your brain — rather than going off only when something is really dangerous or scary, the anxious person’s mental landscape will fall to chaos over all manner of things, however tiny or inconsequential. In fact, sometimes the thing that causes the reaction is so tiny or inconsequential that even we don’t know what it was. Other times, something that has caused a reaction in the past is a total non-event in the present.

(Porsche Brosseau/flickr)

3) With anxiety, some days are good days, and some days are bad days

I mean, don’t get me wrong — this is true of life in general. But I mention it because it’s the thing I most often find myself wishing everyone in my life already knew: some days are good anxiety days, and some days are bad anxiety days, and whether I’m having a good anxiety day or a bad anxiety day is going to affect the way I react to the things and people around me. If, for example, I’m having a bad anxiety day, and somebody in my life gets angry at me? There’s a pretty decent chance that I’m going to either a) have a panic attack, b) burst into tears, c) say anything I can think of to make their anger go away, or d) all of the above. Of course, I can’t (and don’t) expect the people in my life not to get angry at me, or to only get angry at me on specific day; sometimes I do things wrong, and make people angry, and that’s normal, and healthy, and okay. But I wish it was also considered normal, and healthy, and okay for me to say, “Hey, I’m having a bad anxiety day, can we do this another time,” and trust that the person I’m saying it to knows it’s not a cop-out or an excuse so much as a delay — and a request for kindness.

4) Anxiety is physically painful

Of course it’s emotionally painful, too — in fact, I’d argue that the emotional pain is the worst of it — but most people know that part, and not this one. So: surprise! Anxiety hurts. Panic attacks are the pinnacle of the physical pain piece for most of us, since so much of that experience is centered around the sensation that your chest is tightening to the point that you can’t breathe. But anxiety can also cause headaches, nausea, heart palpitations, muscle tension, insomnia, dizziness, and exhaustion. There are people who have deeply painful gastrointestinal responses to anxiety (ever heard the phrase “tying your stomach up in knots?”); there are people who, when anxious, hold their muscles so rigidly that they end up pulling or tearing them. It hurts. It doesn’t hurt the same way for everyone, but it hurts. And that brings me to:

5) Not all anxiety is created equal

I, personally, have generalized anxiety disorder — or, as I like to think of it when we’re at home, “everything everywhere all the time always disorder.” But anxiety comes in many different varieties and flavors, and so do people’s experiences of it. Some people suffer from generalized anxiety; some people deal with social anxiety; some people have specific phobias. Some people come by anxiety genetically; some people develop anxiety as the result of a specific event; some people have anxiety due to their brain chemistry. Some people have been anxious all their lives; some people develop anxiety as a teen or adult; some people eventually overcome anxiety, or at least figure out how to manage it to the point that it’s negligible. Some people medicate their anxiety, and some people don’t. Some people see a therapist to help them with their anxiety and some people don’t.

(mindfulness/flickr)

6) Anxiety and depression are linked

Not all anxious people have depression; not all depressed people have anxiety. But they are known within the mental health community as common companions — and, in fact, one can lead to the other. If, for example, some hypothetical person with an anxiety disorder had the tendency to freeze up when overwhelmed, and had difficulty reaching out to the people in their life when that happened, then that hypothetical person could, hypothetically, remain frozen for long enough that eventually the anxiety (and all their other feelings) could bleed away and leave just the stagnation — in other words, depression. You know, hypothetically. That could occur.

The reason this is on this list isn’t because I think people don’t know about it. I actually think it’s fairly common knowledge, or at least it is in the communities I travel in. It’s because I want you, reader, to understand that we know. We the anxious are typically super aware of the fact that there’s a link between anxiety and depression, and — shockingly — it’s safe to assume we’re pretty anxious about it. For those of us who have experienced a depressive episode in the past, it’s even more likely that we’re quietly freaking out on a pretty regular basis about the chance of that happening again (which, actually, is a rational fear, as your likelihood of experiencing a depressive episode increases with every time you have one). Probably don’t bring it up out of the blue, is what I’m saying here. That, and keep an eye out for it if you can; as freaked out as an anxious person might be about getting depressed, it’s really difficult to notice a depressive episode once you’re actually inside of it.

7) Unless you’ve been given explicit permission, when it comes to someone else’s anxiety, you should probably listen instead of talk

You know how it’s okay when you say something nasty about a member of your family, but if someone else does it, you’re going to come down on them like a ton of bricks? This is like that. I can talk about how exhausting or infuriating I find my anxiety, but if you do that, it’s probably going to hurt my feelings; I can say that I wish I didn’t have anxiety, but if you say that, I’m probably going to think you’re an asshole.

Also — and man, do I wish this went without saying — it’s never okay to talk to about someone else’s mental health issues with a third party, unless you’ve been given explicit permission to do so, or if your relationship with that third party is one involving legally enforceable confidentiality (your therapist, your lawyer, et cetera). Just because someone has told you something about themselves does not mean they’re comfortable with everyone else knowing it. I, obviously, am comfortable with everyone on earth knowing that I’m a nervous wreck, because I would not be writing articles on the internet about it I wasn’t. But mental health issues, anxiety included, are still heavily stigmatized in any number of communities, and there are a lot of people who aren’t at all okay with people finding out about their struggles. There are even people for whom that’s an active anxiety trigger. So, you know. Don’t do the thing.

8) As frustrating, infuriating, agonizing, and exhausting as it can be, our experiences and struggles with anxiety are part of us, and we wouldn’t be the people we are without them

This is actually something I think people with anxiety, myself included, really struggle to understand. We spend so much time trying to work through our anxiety that it can become almost like another consciousness living within our brain: an enemy that we need to get rid of in order to live full, productive lives. The reality of the situation, as usual, is more complicated than that. Though our anxiety is something that we have to manage, it’s also part of who we are. It shapes choices we make, the way we looked at the world, and even facets of our personalities. To look as it as an enemy is to deny that part of ourselves any validity.

About a year ago, my therapist pointed out that I am an anxious person, that I am probably going to be an anxious person for the rest of my life, and that my personality involves certain quirks and tics that are the result of anxiety. It shocked me, even though I’d known for years that I had generalized anxiety disorder — I thought of my anxiety as a disease that needed curing instead of as an (admittedly frustrating) part of who I was. Since then, I’ve worked hard to stop thinking that way, and it’s hugely helped me to dispel the lingering sense of failure and inadequacy that I’d known for years as anxiety’s partner in crime. It’s okay to be an anxious person, and that’s something worth mentioning to the anxious people in your life — they really, honestly, might not know that.

(Casey Muir-Taylor/flickr)

9) And, finally, the most important thing I wish everyone knew about anxiety, and about mental health issues in general: if you know someone with anxiety and you want to help them, ask them what would be helpful, ideally during a time when they are calm and non-panicked

The most unkind thing you can do to a person with anxiety is to pile on, which can be a tricky thing, because it may be something you do without realizing it. The thing about anxiety is that it makes possibility-spinners of all of us — we are, as a group, the sort of people who look at what could happen instead of what is happening, whether we want to or not. And this results in hyper-aware, hypersensitive people more often than it doesn’t; it’s impossible to torture yourself with thoughts of how others might behave or react to things if you don’t know how others generally behave or react to things. Your frustration with us and our spiraling thoughts, your exhaustion at how difficult we can be to deal with, your annoyance at our anxiety-rooted behaviors, your wish that we could just cut it out: we know you are feeling those things. We can tell. And, perhaps more to the point, we are feeling them also — we are also frustrated, exhausted, annoyed at ourselves. We also wish we could just stop. The difference between us and you is that we are thinking those things all the time, because we spend our lives with that anxious personality that can become so grating. There is also a great deal of guilt and self-loathing that comes along with those thoughts for us, both because most of us are struggling daily to feel better and because we really don’t want to bother anyone.

It is okay, if you have an anxious person in your life, to find them frustrating or exhausting or annoying. Nobody is blaming you. In fact, believe me: we get it. But you have the ability to walk away when you find yourself responding to someone’s anxiety that way, and that gift (and it is a gift) is not one we share. It is better to walk away from an anxious person than it is to feed their frustration with your own. It is better to walk away from an anxious person than it is to tell them they need to calm down — we know we need to calm down, and hearing you say it only adds guilt and failure to the pile of emotions that was already overwhelming us. Distracting us can be helpful, listening to us can be helpful, even sitting with us in silence can be helpful, but please, I beg of you, don’t pile on. It makes it so much harder to get to a calmer place, and we really want to do that.

As for what you should do, much though I appreciate your making it to the end of this article, there is no advice that I, A Stranger On The Internet, can give you that will be better than the advice that they, The Person You Actually Know Whose Specific Experience You Are Concerned With, are going to be able to offer. They know themselves, and that makes them a lot more likely to know what they need than I am. You’d be surprised by how many people are afraid to even ask the question. Do not worry, friends. The anxious person in your life? They know they are anxious. Your bringing it up is unlikely to startle them.

In the event that you do ask them and they don’t know what they need, then I will say this: everybody needs kindness, especially people who are predisposed to being unkind to themselves. You’d be amazed how much little things — a smile, a reassurance, a compliment, a sandwich — can lift somebody’s spirits, and people with anxiety are often afraid or unable to ask for those things, even when (especially when) they need them. So that’s my advice: kindness. It’s a hard one to go wrong on.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

9 secrets I’ve uncovered about depression

2020-09-16T15:24:13-04:00

My relationship with depression is a complicated one. I have, clinically speaking, been grappling with it since I was a teenager; I was diagnosed for the first time at 15, and then again in my early twenties, and then again by my current therapist a little less than a year ago. The question of how long I’ve known I suffered from depression, however, is where things get a little hairy — I thought it was laughable at 15, and considered it a misdiagnosis at 20. It’s only in the last year that I’ve really looked the thing in the face, accepted it as part of my life, and started to consciously do the work involved in keeping it under control.

A few months back, I wrote an article here on Vox about the 9 things I wish people understood about anxiety. I was comfortable writing that piece, because after a lifetime with generalized anxiety disorder and five years actively wrestling with how best to manage it, I feel like I really understand anxiety: its ins and outs, its ups and downs, the shape and size of the thing. I like to think that some day, I will be able to write that sort of article about depression. I like to think that some day, I will know this piece of myself that well.

Today, however, is not that day. Depression and I are in a much more tenuous place with one another. I am still learning its landscape, and it is still surprising me, tripping me up, and shaking the foundations of things that I once thought I knew. I can’t tell you what I wish people understood about depression because I myself don’t fully understand it yet, and I can’t imagine delineating a list that I myself am still struggling to learn. So, instead, here are nine secrets I’ve uncovered about depression in experiencing it, which no one told me about, and which I never could have anticipated going in. They may not be secrets to everyone, and I hope they don’t stay secrets to anyone for long, because knowing each one of them has helped me through this process.

1) Depression is a liar

If I had the power to put anything on television, it wouldn’t be a channel that showed nothing but Boy Meets World reruns. It wouldn’t be a ticker that ran along the bottom of the screen during sporting events with the text of the Harry Potter novels in it, so that those of us who hate football would have something to do in sports bars. No, it would be a 15-second spot, airing during every single commercial break on every single channel, that said: “If you have depression, it is lying to you.” Because it is. Every moment of every day, in your waking and sleeping hours, depression is telling you lies.

Here is a small sampling of the lies depression has told me over the years: you’re lazy. You’re worthless. You’re never going to amount to anything. If you ever do amount to anything, it will be a complete fluke, and not the result of any work, skill, or talent on your part. Your family hates you. Your friends hate you. Your family and friends don’t hate you, but they would, if they knew what you were really like. You’re rotten. You’re stupid. The very core of who you are is garbage. The people in your life would be better off without you. The world at large would be better off without you. Nothing you do matters. Nothing you say matters. Nothing at all matters, except how terrible you are, which matters more than anything else could ever matter. You suck. You suck. You suck.

Today — to be strictly accurate, at the moment of writing this article — I know that these are lies. I know that they’re lies because I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy learning that they are lies, and that depression is a liar, and that the things your brain spits at you when it’s in a depressive period are lies the vast majority of the time. But when I’m depressed, I really, really believe these things are true. In fact, if during a future depression I were to come back to this article and stare at it, I can promise you I would think, “What was I talking about? Those aren’t lies — in fact, that’s the truth. The idea that those things might not be true — that’s the lie.”

2) Depression is a bully

It’s a sneaky, manipulative bully. Not only that — it’s a sneaky, manipulative bully that knows all your weaknesses and tender spots, and has at its disposal an arsenal of every uncomfortable moment, rejection, embarrassment, and emotional wound you’ve ever sustained in your life. It is, to put it simply, that kid who throws rocks at other kids on the playground.

I was lucky enough to grow up with two emotionally intelligent parents. They taught my brothers and me that bullying, more often than not, comes from a place of unhappiness. And of course depression is, in a number of ways, unhappiness given a name and a medical classification — it makes sense that it would have so much in common with that type of personality. But the thing about bullies is that the common wisdom about them often proves false. “Sticks and stones might break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” for example, has been thrown around for generations, but most people I know (myself included) would happily trade a wallop with either object for the erasure of certain words from our personal histories. Likewise, the “just ignore it” theory, regularly presented as the solution to a bullying personality, is virtually useless advice when it comes to fighting depression. Depression does not want to be ignored; it wants to be in charge, and it will take advantage of any opportunity to gain ground. Left unchecked — indeed, ignored — depression can sneak and manipulate its way into the deepest recesses of your brain, becoming that much harder to eradicate.

Which is why:

3) If you think you might be depressed, you have to tell somebody

I know, I know — this isn’t a secret. You’ve heard this one before. So have I: as part of anti-suicide campaigns, or scrawled at the bottom of pamphlets with things like “There Is Hope For You” written on the cover. I have to mention it anyway, though, because of the thought I’ve always had in response to the “tell somebody” advice: “It doesn’t apply to me.”

See, one of the complicated things about depression is that it comes in a variety of types and severities. The most visible types are the ones that can put people at high suicide risk: severe bipolar disorder — which can jerk people from manic highs to frightening lows — or an intense bout of clinical depression, which might drop someone so deep into what I think of as “the pit” that without seeking immediate help, they could be in very real danger of hurting or even killing themselves. And, of course, if you suspect that you or a loved one are at high risk for self-harm or suicide, you should absolutely tell someone at once. I don’t for a second mean to suggest that that isn’t the case. Tell your family! Tell a therapist! Don’t tell me — I’m just a girl on the internet with some lived experience, and I make no claims of being a professional — but definitely, definitely tell someone.

Having said that, though, for a lot of us, depression isn’t — or at least doesn’t feel like — something that makes us high-risk for suicide. What I have, for example, is moderate clinical depression, linked in to my generalized anxiety disorder. It’s the kind of thing that might slow me down or even stop me in my tracks, but it’s never pushed me to a place where I was in danger of seriously harming myself. And that fact — the fact that I’m not thinking about killing myself any time soon — has, more than once, given depression an avenue to keep me from getting help. It has allowed thoughts like, “You’re not depressed enough for it to really count,” or “This is something you should be able to handle on your own,” or, “Nobody wants to be bothered with your problems,” or, “When they say you should tell someone if you think you’re depressed, they’re not talking to you.”

I am here to say: if you think you might be depressed, then I am talking to you. Whether mild, moderate, or severe, depression is not something you should be trying to handle on your own. That’s not, by the way, because you’re not strong enough, or smart enough, or anything enough to deal with it by yourself — it’s because depression distorts your thinking, and to sort through something that distorts your thinking, you need help that does not live inside your own brain. You need an ally that your depression does not have the power to affect. You need an objective party, and when you are depressed, thinking about yourself in an objective way becomes incredibly difficult.

4) Suicidal thoughts aren’t always part of depression, and even when they are, they’re not always active suicidal thoughts

An active suicidal thought might look something like this: “I wish I was dead, so today/tomorrow/next week/next month, I’m going to overdose on enough pills that I don’t have to continue being alive.” Active suicidal thoughts involve intent, even if it’s intent to do something a long time from now. They involve a plan, even if it’s a vague plan. They’re what people think “suicidal thoughts” mean, and they’re not wrong, exactly. It’s just not the entire definition.

The other variety of suicidal thoughts looks more like this: “I’m going to go to sleep, and I hope that I don’t wake up tomorrow,” or, “Man, if I just jerked the steering wheel a little to the left, my car would flip over the highway partition and I could stop living — wouldn’t that be nice?” These are what are called passive suicidal thoughts; there’s no real intent behind them, and there’s not necessarily a concrete plan involved. They are, in essence, fantasies about dying, which crop up because depression has made the idea of dying more appealing than the idea of continuing to be alive. I won’t lie here, though I’d honestly prefer to: though I’ve never been in danger of truly harming myself, I’ve experienced passive suicidal thoughts alongside depression many times over the years. This type of thought is not as dangerous as the active type, of course, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not dangerous, because the one can lead to the other. Enough passive suicidal thoughts, built up over time, can become an active one.

Having said that, depression is often reduced — even in the minds of the depressed — to, essentially, the suicide disease, and that’s neither accurate nor helpful. Some of us never experience suicidal thoughts at all; some of us have only ever experienced the passive ones I just mentioned; some of us have experienced active suicidal thoughts, but they’ve been few and far between.

Regardless of the volume of these thoughts, treating a friend or loved one who has told you they are depressed like they are automatically a suicide risk is often a mistake. For one thing, if a depressed person knows you are worried about that, they may be afraid to talk to you, or think that mentioning it would be burdening you, in the event that those thoughts do crop up. And, of course, there is the fact that the person underneath the depression — the person that depression is lying to, bullying, and bossing around — is probably very, very frightened of both the idea and the reality of suicidal thoughts. Having a part of your brain wishing you would die, whether actively or passively, is really scary, and it can be incredibly exhausting to have to comfort others on that subject when you’re already struggling to comfort yourself.

5) Depression and sadness aren’t (always) the same thing

Don’t get me wrong — they can be. Certainly depression can bring with it bouts of sadness and despair. Certainly, when depressed, things that might not bring you down otherwise can sink you into a dark mood. Depression once made me burst into tears of anguish over a Simple Plan song, so trust me, it can find the melancholia in almost anything. But more than sadness, more than despair, the word that really characterizes depression is numbness. Depression takes your feelings and bottles them up, only to release them without warning in unpleasant, incongruous bursts. When you’re depressed, you tend to bounce between feeling so much you think it might tear you to pieces, and feeling absolutely nothing at all.

The way that I always think of it can be sourced back to Terry Pratchett, the author of a number of my favorite novels. He brings up this paradox in a few of his books: “Open the box with the crowbar you will find inside.” That’s what the numbness portion — by which I mean, the vast majority — of depression is like. Your emotions, normal reactions, motivations, positive thoughts; these things are inside of a box, and also inside of that box is a crowbar with which the box can be opened. It’s a frustrating situation, although, of course, it doesn’t feel frustrating when it’s happening, because your ability to feel frustrated is inside the box with everything else. Instead, you mostly feel like it doesn’t matter, because you mostly feel like nothing matters.

6) You can be depressed without knowing it

Yes, it’s counterintuitive. Yes, it sounds impossible. Still, the fact remains that it’s true. The thing about the overwhelming numbness of depression, the constant certainty that nothing at all matters, is that it can blind you to changes in your mood and behavior. Even if you’re tracking those things, if nothing matters, then they don’t matter either. I’ve been depressed, more than once, without having any idea that that’s what was going on. I’ve also realized that I was depressed in the middle of periods of depression, rather than at the beginning, and only realized the full extent of things in looking over the weeks and months prior.

The people in your life can be hugely helpful on this front, especially if they know what to look for, because:

7) Depression can be visible

It can also be invisible, of course, but the idea that it’s always invisible is just not accurate. Depression often erodes one’s abilities to complete basic tasks that wouldn’t be a problem in a healthier, less depressed period, and personal care and hygiene are very much included in that list. When I get depressed, my clothing, hair, and physical appearance all tend to suffer, not to mention the cleanliness of my apartment (which I must admit is not what you’d call spotless at the best of times).

If you’re someone who knows they are prone to depression, taking the time to sit down with the people in your life and ask them to keep an eye out for this kind of slippage can be really, really helpful in catching a depressive period before you’re all the way at the bottom of the hole. Conversely, if there’s someone in your life you know is prone to depression, it can be good idea to keep this point in mind. I’m not, of course, advocating screaming, “YOU’RE DEPRESSED!” in someone’s face if you notice that they’re not looking fantastic one day. But in the event that you see slippage for a few weeks at a time, it may be worthwhile to (gently, kindly) ask them if they are feeling all right, and if there is anything you can do to help. It can be really, really difficult for a depressed person to reach out and ask for help — remember, depression is a liar and a bully, and often insists that to ask for assistance is selfish and wrong. Your taking that first step can mean the world to someone who is struggling.

8) Depression responds to routine and structure

No, really. It does. When you’re depressed, it doesn’t feel like it’s going to. When you’re depressed, the idea of maintaining any routine, following any structure or, indeed, getting out of bed often feels borderline insane. But the fact remains that this is true. Conversely, long periods without routine and structure can be depression’s breeding ground; this is why unemployment and depression are common bedfellows.

I’m not, by nature, someone who is much for either structure or routine; in fact, if I’d been born neurotypical, my life might well be a nomadic one where I followed my whims, or the remaining members of the Grateful Dead, or both. As it is, I’ve figured out a variety of little routines and structures that I can apply to my days, weeks, and months, and which help immensely in keeping my head above the depression waters. I’m not going to detail those routines here, because depression management is a very personal thing, and works a little differently for each person. But it is manageable.

9) Depression is not the end of the world

It’ll do its best to trick you into believing it is, but that’s just another one of its lies. The truth is, depression is a pain, both figuratively and literally; it can be dangerous and frightening; it can slow down or even stall out your life for a while; it can be hard to deal with, overwhelming, and upsetting. But it’s not the end of the world. It’s just something that requires some careful thought, awareness, and management — in other words, it’s something that requires some work. The trick, at least in my experience, is knowing that it’s doable work, work that you are more than capable of handling, no matter what your depression tries to tell you. And, like all work, it gets easier the longer you do it. The incomparable Allie Brosh wrote a two–part post on depression a few years ago, which was then and remains to this day the best explanation I’ve ever seen on this topic; it’s sharply funny as well as being searingly honest, and I highly recommend reading it. It truly illustrates the whole of the thing — the way there is struggle to this, but hope too, and levity even where you’re not expecting to find it.

As for me: today, right now, depression is still hard work, but it’s not the backbreaking effort it was a few years ago, or even the uphill climb it was a few months back. Some day, I truly believe that managing it will be no more difficult than, say, feeding myself, or keeping my unruly hair in check — daily tasks that, though not effortless, I mastered years ago, and even take some pleasure in doing these days. Until then, I will continue to strive and struggle, succeeding in some moments and failing in others, and taking heart in the fact that I am far from alone. That’s no secret, but it bears repeating: no matter where you are in the process of figuring out depression, you are not alone.