When the days feel heavy: managing a depressive low

Better days will come, I’m told. Days that don’t feel heavy.

It’s difficult to believe that improvement is possible from, as one friend so perspicaciously put it, the hostile internal reality inside my mind. The past few months have been filled with a heaviness, revulsion, and the feeling that it is impossible to rise in the morning — because what’s the point when wakeful thoughts are so exhausting? The constant internal barrage of, Why didn’t you do X like Y instead? Everyone thinks you are stupid. You are a bad journalist. Could have done better. No one will ever love you.

I hope that I have passed the worst of this particular low. I hope that I have beaten back the near-constant, berating, silent shrieks, and the tears that come for little apparent reason.

It’s not like this is new. I have suffered from anorexia for the best part of two decades, and the comorbidity of depression (that just means that anorexia and depression came at the same time for me, but whenever doctors have used it, I have always thought it sounds very appropriate, as both conditions have made me feel like I wanted to die). I have written about my experiences on multiple occasions in the past. I shan’t repeat all the details here, but I have realised that I am still torn apart by the long process of recovery.