Trigger warning: talk of depression
Such a cheery title right?
Imagine, you’re in a room. Let’s make it a familiar room, like a bedroom or your home office. You’re comfortable in the room and it has what you need; entertainment, food, and maybe a few friends, but 1/3 of that room is a pit. A big one right in the center that’s just deep enough where you can’t easily get out without some serious climbing involved.
Most of the time you do a good job avoiding the pit. Maybe a foot slips in here and there or you lose balance a few times and almost fall but catch yourself just in time, giggling a little at the rush of adrenaline from the near miss. And then one day you’re walking around the room, completely, blissfully unaware of the pit, and you fall. Hard. Smackdown to the bottom.
You look up to see your friends and family around the edge cheering for you to escape it but once you realize how deep it is, you’re not sure how long it’ll take you to get out. Eventually with some effort and work, you make it out! You think to yourself “Thank god that’s over,” and you carry on with your days. Then a few months later the same things happen, only this time, there are only two or three people looking over the edge to cheer for you. The rest think “ah, they got out before, they can do it again! They don’t need me.” This time it takes you longer to get out. And sure enough, sometime later on, you fall in again. This happens over and over till eventually, you start to worry if you’ll have the energy or even the desire to get out of that pit.
I can’t speak for everyone, but for me personally, this is what my depression feels like. There have been spans of time as long as years that I’ve spent in that pit thinking “okay well this is it, I can survive this I guess.” I’d climb up to a point but something would happen and I’d slip back down again. After so many falls, I just got tired of trying to leave the pit and would settle in for the long haul. This is obviously no way to live, so you can imagine how desperate I was to figure out a way to get out and stay out of that gaping hole.
The hard part is that nobody is going to jump into that pit to save you. Sometimes they’ll stop even coming to the edge to check-in. But there are also those rare few who stick around, bring a chair and a megaphone, and yell down and encourage you the whole time you’re fighting to get out. Even with this encouragement, YOU have to find the way up and out of there.
With time, therapy, and a lot of reflection I found what works for me. Physical activity, walks with my dogs, quality time with my spouse and friends; these became boxes that I could stack from the bottom of the pit until I had enough stacked up to climb out. Those boxes aren’t always sturdy and it can be exhausting stacking them up, one after another. But keeping at it, slow and steady, will eventually get you out and with the living again. As my favorite podcaster Ross Bolen says, “You gotta stack good days.”
Now, this is my struggle and journey and I can’t say the same for others who experience depression. For some, that pit is deeper than others or you don’t feel like you have enough boxes to stack up in order to get out. Or you don’t see or hear people at the edge cheering for you to keep fighting. What I’ve had to learn and remind myself daily is that there is ALWAYS a way out of the pit. You won’t always be able to avoid falling in, you may even get stuck in there for a while, but eventually, you will make it out again. Then you can take a deep breath and tell yourself, “I did it,” and know that if/when you fall in again, you can and WILL find your way out.
Savannah Jung 