Just So You Know, Your Depression Doesn’t Define You

Just so you know, your depression doesn’t define you.

It might feel like it does. Sometimes it might even feel like it consumes you completely, and I understand that. Because sometimes my depression does the same thing to me. It swallows me whole and drowns me in self-doubt. Then, it strangles me with poisonous thoughts and convinces me I’m unworthy of love, and sometimes even life. But I’m not unworthy, and neither are you.

Depression is just pure evil that convinces you everything is wrong, including yourself. It gets inside your body, and your mind, and your soul, and it cuts you down to your very core. Depression is lonely because it’s only understandable to the people who have fought through it themselves. It’s an unexplainable nightmare you keep waking up from, but you never actually get out of.

It’s inescapable and when the people around you urge you to bring yourself out of it, you only fall in deeper.

It steals your drive of passion and takes away your will to love. It leaves you stranded all alone, feeling like a mess whose only contribution to the world is their sadness. It swallows you, and it consumes you, and then it makes you believe all you are is your depression. But you’re not. You are more, and you always have been.

You are a human being. A human who has made someone smile, and someone laugh, and someone feel. You’ve impacted people with your own smile, and your own laugh, and your own feelings. You have beliefs and passions and a journey to a destination you are destined to reach. You have your own path in life that is only meant for you and your mind to conquer. 

You’re a human who has made a difference in the world, whether you realize it or not.

You’re a friend who is needed, and a family member who is loved deeply. You’re a person who can understand something as devastating as depression and help other people who struggle with it by simply letting them know they are not alone.

You are powerful, and compassionate. You are caring, beautiful, and one of a kind. There is only one person on this planet who has everything you’ve got, and that’s you. And that makes you important, and needed, and rare.

You are an incredibly strong human being, and never try to say that you aren’t. I know you are, because you’ve felt the type of lowness that has left people utterly broken, and yet you’re still here.

You’re here, and you’re still fighting. You are not your depression. You are a warrior who fights a daily battle within yourself and survives it every single day.

You are a survivor. A human who has felt pure emptiness and lived through it. And most of all, you are someone who deserves love and the life you live, because what defines you could never be minimized to a single word, unless that word is more.