Depression Hurts... What truly helps?

Depression...


Many of us have experienced it at least once in our lives. Some of us have had worse cases than others. I remember as a child and a younger teenager I wondered how and why people became depressed. I never really understood why those people couldn't just pick everything up and move on with their lives. It seemed strange to me that these people couldn't get over it: they were stuck.

Recently, I discovered just how powerful depression actually is. I would never have understood what depression actually is if I hadn't experienced it myself. How do you define depression? That's a tough one. I would describe my experience like this:
Depression is when you lose the drive to do anything. Everything seems useless because there's no point to anything, especially one's own life. Everyday you wake up and there's a haze in your head. It consumes you, and you can't see farther than the negative in your life. Yeah you can feel happy for a while, but at any moment you can drop right into a state of gloom, where, for no reason whatsoever, nothing can get you out of the dumps. And it can happen fast: a matter of seconds is all the time you need. There is never a moment when you don't have the nagging piece in the back of your mind that reminds you that life is pointless. Even if you seem or feel happy at the moment, you are always on the verge of dropping into an indifferent mood. Eventually, the feeling of being worthless and useless to society wears on you so much that you don't see the point to life any more. When you get to this point, some people would end it all, and others wake up.
I survived depression. I woke up.

I wondered why I had been depressed when my life started to get normal again. Depression had never seemed like something I would ever have to deal with, yet I had just come out of the deepest vat of it. Why? And what actually pulled me out of it?

The why part is pretty easy to figure out, really. I had just went through a break up, and I thought I was fine, but obviously it affected me more than I had originally thought. That, compacted with some stress in my life, must've just overwhelmed me.
The how part is a little more tricky. The only thing I can put as the reason is God. He wasn't done with me yet, and even if I had attempted to kill myself, I'm not sure it would've worked because I still have a purpose on this earth.

I remember I was laying on the sofa, after an evening and night of thinking about how worthless and pointless my life was. I thought that life wasn't worth living. And for a moment, leaving the earth seemed like an amazing thing. Death seemed so sweet to me. I fell asleep at that moment.
When I woke up, everything hit me. What had just happened? I had actually allowed myself to believe that living or dying was up to me. I sat up, and all the hurt and depressed feelings I had been living with for the previous two months seemed to fall off of me. The haze that I had been waking up with cleared almost immediately in my head. It reminds me of the cold white fog that you can stand in and not be able to see across the street, and then the wind lightly blows through and carries it past you, and suddenly, you can see the beauty of the new morning: the sunrise in all it's glory, the blooming flowers, the whiteness of the majestic mountain tops... The rush of the cool moisture in the air over your skin... The sudden abundant amount of light that engulfs you.... That was, by far, the most liberating feeling I have ever experienced in my entire life.

So what was the liberating force?
God.

I know that sounds so cliché, but I can honestly say that it's very true. I may have not felt His forces at work as I woke up physically and mentally that morning, but, if he hadn't saved me the night before and delivered me the following morning, I'm not sure I'd still be here telling this story of renewal right now.
I've learned a valuable lesson. God is amazing, and everyone needs a friend when they feel like there's nothing left to live for. Honestly, I didn't really have a friend to be there for me, but I want to be that friend for someone who needs that push to live.