Depression can feel so alone, like no one understands what you’re experiencing. It’s a feeling like there is nothing to hold on to, and nothing to believe in. Sometimes just knowing that other people have also shared in similar feelings can provide just enough hope to get through a difficult moment. In that light, below are a few quotes from others who have also felt hopeless, lost, and depressed. You are never alone.
“In depression…faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute…It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.” ~William Styron
“That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.” ~Elizabeth Wurtzel
“I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never meant any such thing. I have made a captive of myself and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
“[The] Great suffer hours of depression through introspection and self-doubt. That is why they are great. That is why you will find modesty and humility the characteristics of such men.” ~ Bruce Barton
”I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would be not one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell. I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better it appears to me.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
“How heavy the days are. There is not a fire that can warm me, Not a sun to laugh with me.Everything base. Everything cold and merciless. And even the beloved dear stars look desolately down.”~Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
“While in these days of quiet desperation, as I wander through this world in which I live, I search everywhere for some new inspiration but it’s more than cold reality can give.” ~Billy Joel
“I’m frightened. I’m always anticipating that someone is going to scream at me, a cop in the street, my boss. I’m sure I’m going to be held up or get a flat tire at rush hour. Every ache and pain in my body convinces me I’m going to die of cancer. I can’t sleep. I wake up in the early hours of the morning terrified. I’m either afraid of dying or that the house is going to be broken into. I have nightmares. I wake up sweating, paralyzed with fear. It’s been several weeks now. I think I can’t make it, I can’t go through another day and night feeling this way. I feel beaten up, my body feels as if I’ve been in a fight. Nobody seems to understand.” ~ Richard, You Are Not Alone
“My creative powers have been reduced to a restless indolence. I cannot be idle, yet I cannot seem to do anything either. I have no imagination, no more feeling for nature, and reading has become repugnant to me. When we are robbed of ourselves, we are robbed of everything!” ~ Goethe
“Sometime in your life you will go on a journey. It will be the longest journey you have ever taken. It is the journey to find yourself.” ~ Katherine Sharp
One of the many things I hate about the word “depression” is the assumption of blankness attached to it, as if the experience of depression is as absent on the inside as it looks to be from the outside. That is wrong. Depression is a place that teems with nightmarish activity. It’s a one-industry town, a psychic megalopolis devoted to a single twenty-four-hour-we-never-close product. You work misery as a teeth-grinding muscle-straining job (is that why it’s so physically exhausting?), proving your shameful failures to yourself over and over again. Depression says you can get blood from a stone, and so that’s what you do. Competing voices are an irritating distraction from the work. No wonder depression doesn’t get invited out much. Not because it’s not the life of the party, it knows it’s not that, but because self-absorption as a work ethic is so prickly and one-eyed. That’s okay with depression—it figures, who’d want to be friends with it, anyway? ~ Lesley Dormen, “Planet No”
I yearned to get better; I told myself I was getting better. In fact, the depression was still there, like a powerful undertow. Sometimes it grabbed me, yanked me under; other times, I swam free. ~Tracy Thompson, The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
WOW. These quotes are amazing! Thanks so much for sharing them here. They are GREAT.
Positively Present´s last blog ..the positive power of music
Dear Positively Present Dani,
As I run across more personal, candid accounts of depression, I will add them to this article. If you, or anyone reading this journal entry, had a quote to add, please offer it in the comments section or email it to me and I will place it in the body of the main article.
Also, I ready your biography on http://positivelypresent.typepad.com/about.html and salute you for taking your own joy and evolotion into your own hands. One of my favorite expressions is that it is “never too late to live a happy childhood.” And it’s never to late to create a fulfilling today.
Sending best wishes and joy,
Annette
Wow! That was my first thought, too! One thing that I realized while reading them is that the experience of depression is just as univeral as it is personal and unique. It is only when we are on the other side that we realize there IS a light at the end of that tunnel, and it’s NOT the light of an oncoming train! As difficult as they were at the time, I would not trade my bouts with depression over the years, for it was through those parts of my journey that I made tremendous growth…just like a caterpillar in its cocoon.
Dear Marsha,
How brave you are to endure the descents into your own bouts of spiritual depression. You met your demons face-to-face and brought them back into the light of your divine self. My heart is filled with love for you and with you.
While working as a medical editor a few years ago, I was lucky enough to read tons of materials about depression.
What so few people understand, even to this day, is that depression is a MEDICAL DISEASE, not a crisis of the soul (although it can feel that way). In the same way Type II diabetics cannot absorb their own insulin, a clinically depressed person cannot absorb the seratonin created by their own brain. This disease can be FATAL.
I wrote a piece about it all on Open Salon in April. I really hope I can spread some factual info about this most misunderstood illness.
http://www.open.salon.com/blog/mary_ann_farley/2009/04/21/understanding_suicide
Mary Ann Farley
Dear Mary Ann,
Thank you for sharing your insights on depression. You offer great support to those dealing with clinical depression. I have empathy for the challenges you have faced in your lifetime, respect for your courage to move forward with integrity, and love for your willingness to extend a helping hand to others who are suffering as you have.
I would like to add a broader perspective that depression can come in various forms ranging from situational depression resulting from a response to a stressful event to a severe psychological condition like manic-depressive illness. Some causes have to do with physiology, internal chemical imbalance, or genetics. While other types of depression stem from engaging in low energy life choices, such as drug or alcohol abuse. Different types of depression benefit from differing modalities of management, including pharmaceutical treatment.
In this blog Divine Self! I speak openly about spiritual depression. Spiritual depression is not a disease and therefore there is no cure. It is a journey, a torturous journey, when we go beyond the old definitions of who we thought ourselves to be. Yet this is the experience of our changing consciousness. It is the unraveling, the coming apart of our old belief structures and definitions of God, Life, and Self.
During spiritual depression parts of you are not knowing what is happening. Can you survive? Do you even want to? How difficult and how deep do things have to become before something new kicks in? It’s a complex transition period to go through. It’s not easy. The journey itself is a self-earned rite of passage to reclaim your sovereignty. To take back the authority and self-reliance you have given to others.
Thank you Mary Ann for adding to the depth of our discussion on depression and offering your perspectives. I wish you blessings and love, Annette
I have a copy of William Styron’s book “Darkness Visible…..A Memoir of Madness” and have read it several times. He gives a clear insight of what a manic depressive’s life is actually like……very enlightening!
“We are moved yet not depressed by his account: with him, we feel uplifted by a sense of catharis and can at last begin to fathom depression’s dark reality.” ___Edward Morris
I could not express how I felt any better then Edwar Morris.
William Styron also wrote “Sophie’s Choice” which I also enjoyed…….made into a movie……wonderful.
Dearest Kathleen,
Thank you for sharing your heartfelt review of William Styron’s book “Darkness Visible.” http://www.amazon.com/Darkness-Visible-Madness-William-Styron/dp/0679736395
for anyone lost in their own dark night of the soul, Styron’s account can be like a security blanket when there is very little else to hold on to.