When You're Too Depressed to Get Out of Bed

I am writing this piece slowly, point by point, because I'm depressed today. Woke up with the thought that I've ruined everything and hurt everyone and it clamped on me like a vise. I'm moving slowly, I just want to sleep. Depression as some misplaced instinct to hibernate. I could sleep all day. 

This year, my depression came with something I'm calling the Stabs. They're what they sound like: an acute wave of grief that feels kind of stabby, mostly around the chest, usually followed by me shouting "OH NO," or "I'M BAD," or "I'M SORRY," at myself. They happen the most in the middle of the night or immediately first thing in the morning or in the evening.

Getting out of bed today felt like scraping a layer of muck out of a dirty tub. I feel like my brain is an engine that won't start. It sputters and turns itself off again. Then more stabs.

Of course the key is to keep doing everything you'd normally do even though it feels miserable. But the impulse to return to bed is overwhelming.

Selfishly, it would be nice if the world helped out at these moments by being an inspiring place. Of course, it isn’t.

But I'm not trying to write about hopelessness, or to turn the suffering of the world into some metaphorical referent to the suffering of my own brain. I'm trying to write about the opposite.

I'm trying to write about the process of getting up to believe in the world, again and again and again. To keep summoning the willpower to hope. A process which, as it happens, feels pretty much the same as making yourself get out of bed in the morning when you're really depressed.

There's the reasoning with yourself.

The hesitation and the rationalization and the fear.

And the doubt.

Then the decision.

The turning your attention to your aim.

And, eventually:

I've heard people say that sometimes, when they're depressed, it helps them to keep living for others when they can't live for themselves. That's never worked for me. What does work is the idea of living out of pure spite: to spite the sadness of the world, to spite the hopelessness.

So today I will spite the badness in the world. I will get out of bed, make one call to a representative, and go from there.

I'm hopeful about the world. Not optimistic, but. Hopeful.Subscribe now