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Reblogged from mentalillnessmouse  167,147 notes
Posted 23, August, 2012

Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation. If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.
It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged. By

EVERYONE NEEDS TO READ THIS.

Depression is not a synonym for being sad or having a bad day/bad week.

(via stuck-in-the-labyrinth)

My clinical depression is and was impossible to explain to someone because i struggle to change my thoughts in to words like these. But now, this post has made sense of it all and i will ALWAYS reblog this.

(via criesofinsanity)

This is wonderfully put- It pretty much explains exactly how I feel at the moment. 

(via betterthandarkchocolate)

Reblogged from grumplstiltskin  9,983 notes
Posted 18, August, 2012

The worst part about anxiety attacks, is that you’re aware it’s irrational and sometimes unexplainable, but knowing that gives no aid what so ever. In most cases it deepens the anxiety as you realise “if I know it’s irrational, why can’t I stop it… Oh god I can’t stop it” you begin to believe you are no longer in control of your mind. That. That is fear. By Ami Desu (via grrrlstudies)

Reblogged from loveyourchaos  2,135 notes
Posted 18, August, 2012

What is harder for the nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress: The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to faintness before the end of the shift. The “home” that is also a car or a van. The illness or injury that must be “worked through,” with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick pay or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next. These experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment. They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations. And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans—as a state of emergency. By

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed (via itsnevertoolatte)

Yes, this. You are constantly weighing everything. I will give up food today to have bus fare tomorrow. I won’t buy a secondhand coat because utilities are due. I can’t call in sick no matter how bad it gets because if I lose my job I have nothing. It goes on and on. It is relentless.

(via inautumn-inkashmir)

And even when you do your best to control the shit you can, outside forces are always ready to sink your ship.

(via so-treu)