What Depression Has to Teach You

Sometimes the only thing depression has to teach you is that it’s awful to be depressed and medication can help you with that. But often depression has a lot more to teach you. I hate this reality. If you are saying to yourself right now — fuck that, I hear you. I do NOT want to learn any more lessons, thank you very much. I have learned way too many lessons I never wanted to learn and also, I don’t see why I need to learn lessons more than people who don’t have to be depressed. And couldn’t I have learned those lessons a different way?

I really don’t have anything to say except the stupid answer my parents told me in Kindergarten: life isn’t fair. I don’t have any good explanation for why some people get to learn lessons through depression and other people through other ways and why some people seem to get through life without having to learn any lessons at all. But nonetheless, there are a lot of things that depression has taught me and even if I hate that I had to go through depression to learn them, I’m not anxious to throw out the lessons, either. Maybe the cost I paid makes them even more precious to me.

One of the lessons depression taught me is that no one is guaranteed a single minute of life. I don’t know if this is a true lesson or a good one, but I’m constantly aware of the fact that people can die at any moment. I’m not going to pretend that this makes me superior to…