Now that you have accepted that you are living with depression, your road to recovery is not going to be a walk in the park. You are going to have to face some hard truths about yourself and others in your life. You are going to have to break bad patterns and self-destructive behaviors. You are going to have to learn new ways to manage your emotions. You are going to stumble and have to pick yourself back up. You will have to learn to ask for help when you can't. If you accept that you have depression, then you understand that your brain does not operate the same way as the person without depression.
Let's look at "Winnie the Pooh." This story is a perfect set of "clinically diagnosable" characters in a little boy's psychiatric hospital of an imagination. In every story Pooh's co-dependent behavior ends up dragging the entire gang through some unnecessary adventure. Now let's focus on Christopher Robbin's perspective on depression. Eeyore is always found sitting, usually in a puddle of mud, with no expression, and "negative." The story presents this behavior as negative because the world perceives it as negative. When watching this as a child I always remember thinking, why didn't they ever just leave him be? He was never bothering anybody. He was enjoying his mud baths. Why was he suddenly a problem "they needed to fix," just because he didn't want to go on their adventure.
If the world was only filled with people "suffering from depression" we would all honestly just grow our own food, do things here and there as we wanted, leave each other alone, and be good. It's the world's expectations on us that begin to weigh us down. Well, you don't think or feel like the rest of the world does so stop trying to achieve success in life the "normal" way.
Take your journey through depression like an impromptu, must-do road trip with yourself and the other parts of you. You know these road trips are going to happen throughout your life. You don't know how long they'll last and you don't know where they'll take you. You can be smart, prepare a lot in advance, and maybe make some or most of the road trips not so bad. But no matter what you do and where life takes you, these road trips are going to happen.
Now imagine these road trips with a group of your closest friends. Together through the journey, you bond, laugh, fight, cry, share secrets, and discover truths about each other that bond you against the world for life. You need to do this basically with your depression. Bond with who you are. Laugh with yourself and the ironies of your world. Fight with the part of you that's irrational and out of control. Cry over the emotions you are sorting through. Dig deep inside yourself and discover what it is inside you that controls all this and own the truth of all of it. There will be things you need to change about yourself and you will have to work on changing them. There will be things you can't change about yourself and you will have to accept that. There will be things you find you do in fact love about yourself and you can embrace them. And when the trip is over you'll take the experience and what you learned from it and carry it with you in your life.
Living in your depression can be a very scary thought if you see your depression as nothing but brokenness. But if you turn the episodes of depression into a journey inside yourself, accepting it for what it is, you begin to understand yourself in a way that allows you a new ability to adapt to the stresses of the world around you.
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