You’re not “in a major depression” when your team loses the big game, you’re just sad and disappointed like a normal healthy human gets. One’s a mood, the other’s a mental illness. If you were really depressed, you’d feel the same thing if your team won or lost, or perhaps feel nothing at all regardless of a game’s outcome.

No one was telling me the cards sucked, which to a depressed person means that the cards do suck but everyone’s either too polite or angry to actually tell you that.

How arrogant of me to think that they don’t know what they’re talking about?”

Depression does its damage and then it hides, covering its tracks, making you think that it is not an illness, that you’re just bad and weird.

Depression is an illness that happened to you. Maybe it was from the chemicals and inherited genetic traits that appeared in your brain before you were even born. Maybe it was from a trauma that occurred and then festered in your brain. Maybe there were people with power over you who behaved in a way that screwed you up. It wasn’t you. You didn’t c

In rage and fear, I would then turn on Don, the kid who never talked to anyone and was always dirty, who wore the same clothes every day, and cruelly mock him, thinking I could transfer this awful feeling down the line. I am sorry, Don.

I’ve managed to stop getting worse. I want to be better.”

I didn’t know that depression isn’t a mood. It’s a set of conditions that cause a whole series of thoughts and behaviors to happen over a long period of time, often things that are wildly different from one another.

Depression can’t be cured by positive life circumstances because depression is not a reaction to circumstances.