Inadequate comparisons isolate people with depression and other chronic illness.
Let me tell you a bit about my experience with chronic illness. This was going to be a generic, well structured article about how to interact with someone who has a chronic illness and you don't understand but it has morphed into a bit of an explanation of my own life journey and my own struggles with mental illness. I’ve done a lot of growing in the past few years through this, I think it has softened me a lot and given me a unique empathy for the suffering of others — and a humility I never had before. Everyone has their own struggles, their own heartbreaks, illnesses and lows. They are all legitimate and deserving of their own time, energy, and respect, but when we’re trying to understand others’ highs and lows this can naturally lead us to relate it to something we have experienced ourselves. But we have to be careful with this, because bringing our own stories and experiences in can cloud over the top of the individual you’re speaking to and can just make them feel lonely and unheard.
Along the same vein, there are people who are difficult to speak to because it’s as if everything you say isn’t as good or as bad as something they’ve experienced, they often say things like “that’s NOTHING, this is what happened to me…” or just bring up their own stories even before you’ve finished yours. This kind of one-upmanship is not what I’m trying to address in this article, but it does stem from the same problem; when something that ought to be empathy turns into a comparison you’re probably missing the mark and making people feel small rather than comforted.
As someone with Major Depressive Disorder/Borderline Personality Disorder/Chronic Anxiety I am no stranger to being misunderstood. Anyone with a chronic illness has experienced the complete isolation of living in a world filled with “normal” people who just don’t “get” it. I think the worst kind of misunderstanding is when people make inadequate comparisons with something or other, and I don’t think people know they’re doing it. The intentions of this kind of interaction are fundamentally good, but that doesn’t make them any more helpful, and it doesn’t mean I don’t have the sinking feeling of ‘they really don’t get what I’m going through’ which just serves to make me isolated and upset. The biggest culprits of this through my own personal journey are people who have experienced mild to moderate depression themselves.
I don’t blame anyone for this; I was guilty of it too before I fell into the absolute depths of despair that categorise major depressive disorder; I thought I understood exactly how everyone with depression felt because I had been through it too; but it is honestly a WHOLE different ball game. I never in a million years would have understood someone’s experience of the symptoms I’ve gone through, in fact I never even knew these things existed at all in the 9 years or so that I battled moderate depression. And I now know how wrong I was thinking I knew everything about depression when I had only just experienced the tip of the iceberg — and I’m sure people have been through worse than me too.
Mild depression is STILL debilitating and awful, it can feel like you’re living in a fog — some people feel numb, others just feel sad ALL. THE. TIME. like you have a constant cloud hanging over your head and any “positive” feelings are fleeting while impending doom-like feelings are lurking to swallow you up again. I feel for everyone who’s had to go through depression, it is notoriously difficult to shake and it permeates every part of your life — sucking the joy out of everything; all your relationships, responsibilities, and every part of daily life becomes difficult to manage.
Major depression is different. Instead of feeling like you’re walking around in the real world under a shadow, it’s like you’ve been swallowed up into the earth and ALL you can do is try to see through the dirt to the world above, you can barely breathe let alone function at all. Daily tasks aren’t just hard — they’re impossible. It isn’t just sadness that follows you around throughout the day it is an overwhelming, crushing sense that everything is worthless, meaningless, or even that nothing is real at all; and you can lose the sense of what a ‘day’ is anyway, they all meld in together because all you really know is pain and anguish. Sometimes it feels like there’s a boulder on your chest and no amount of self talk can get your body to move.
It is difficult for me to separate which symptoms are from which mental illness, and I’m not even sure whether all those diagnoses are accurate — mental health is pretty difficult that way so I’m sorry if I get it jumbled; but then again I suppose that’s part of the point. Everyone’s experience is different, whether it is more or less ‘severe’ is only important to know so that you can help them as best you can, but everyone ought to acknowledge that you can never know how another person has felt and you have to trust that what they are telling you is the truth about how they’re experiencing the world.
I’ve seen people’s faces when I’ve told them what it’s been like for me and (maybe part of my paranoia) I’ve seen their disbelief, I’ve seen them dismiss it and think things like “yeah I know depression, I’ve felt that and it sucks but it’s not THAT bad”. I have been through some seriously scary stuff I didn’t think I’d make it through and I have totally lost myself at times, and some of the hardest parts of that is feeling that NO ONE heard me, and no one understands what I am feeling and the lonliness of that is just so intense at times. And even now, I set out to write this post about how comparing feeling sad to feeling depressed or comparing feeling tired to feeling fatigue is fundamentally inadequate and I’m spending so many words fumbling about just to get my message across, just trying to phrase it in a way that someone might understand what it’s been like in my head these past years.
just as an aside — dissociation is the freakiest, most unsettling experience I have ever been through and I would never wish it on anyone — I think barely anyone would understand what it feels to not believe that reality exists, that you exist, to look around and not know who you are or whether anything is actually there at all.
I have severe fatigue like most Major Depressives, statistics show it is the leading cause of disability within depression. Unfortunately, it is also often one of the hardest symptoms to treat. I’ve been so sick with this that I have felt like I am sleeping my life away, spending upwards of 18 hours in bed leaving me feeling like everything is slipping away around me while I struggle to keep my eyes open. An awful feeling. It becomes a choice between doing the laundry or doing the dishes, and no question of doing something ‘fun’ like reading a book or going out to a movie; I simply do not have the energy. It is a depth of ‘tiredness’ that is extremely difficult to understand, and I get that. Heck, even my husband who sees me in this state daily and does everything around the house that I can’t physically do can’t even understand how I feel. Again; I don’t blame people for not understanding any of it, but when I tell someone about fatigue and they respond ‘oh yeah, I’m SO tired too’ when I know they’re able to work full time, and do something fun on the weekend while I can’t stay awake enough to get to a short four hour work shift; that kind of comment is like a slap in the face — it just makes me feel so so alone.
You will probably never experience what I’ve experienced, you’ll probably never have to lie on the floor hyperventilating and crying for hours before finally accepting the reality that you are too sick to go to a family event (again); you’ll probably never have to be held back by someone you love while you’re experiencing a psychotic break and are attempting to grab the kitchen knives to hurt yourself with. And if I didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t know that that’s what I’ve experienced either — because that’s not the part of my life that you see, you only see me when I’m well enough to leave the house.
The worst part is that I can see that you don’t get it when I tell you that I’m unwell and too sick to work and too sick to do barely anything except sleep, you can’t comprehend it. If I hear whispers that people think it was pretty crap that I didn’t turn up to some event it HURTS soooo deeply, because you don’t know how desperately I long to be okay enough to go to things and how heavy it sits on my heart when I cannot; you’ll never see that. You don’t know how many friendships have dropped off because I just can’t communicate or physically go places or do any of the things I ought to be doing and loving. I am honestly so glad that you don’t have to feel the darkness I have felt and had to cling to life when almost everything inside of you wanted to end it. Everyone with chronic illness experiences different isolatation because of different reasons; and you’re unlikely to know the ins and outs of anyone else’s life, let alone their struggles.
It’s okay to not be okay, and it’s okay to not understand the extent to which someone else is suffering. Next time, just listen. Next time, just be there for them, tell them you’re with them; heck even tell them you don’t understand. But please don’t compare things that are miles apart, make someone feel heard — not isolated.
Thanks for reading this big jumbled mess. I put my heart out on the line here just trying to help spread awareness for other people who might be going through something similar to me, or something completely different but something most people don’t understand; and maybe someone else doesn’t have the words to explain why these comparisons make them feel awful and they now have a slightly disjointed written article to share with them that might help them ‘get’ it. Peace and love folks. Sending good vibes.
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