Depression Without Narrative

When you don’t have a recognizable story or compelling narrative, depression feels impossible to justify — both to others and to yourself.

Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash

There is a particular kind of loneliness that can come with depression, when you have no clear explanation for why you’re depressed.

It seems that people are more comfortable talking about the experience of struggling with depression when it is connected to a tangible cause or visible event: trauma, loss, abuse, heartbreak, or another defining struggle. Those experiences are real and deserve to be heard with empathy and compassion. However, when you struggle with depression that seems to exist without a dramatic origin, it often makes you feel invisible — even unworthy of any emotional pain.

People often make connections across demographic and cultural divides through compelling narratives, and this can have a powerful impact when people see themselves reflected in those narratives. However, it can also reinforce the idea that your struggle with depression isn’t relevant when you don’t see yourself reflected in those narratives. When you think about your own experience, you may find yourself trying to think of reasons why your struggle with depression is legitimate and attempt to comprehend if the emotional pain you feel even really matters.

When you don’t have a recognizable story or compelling narrative, depression feels impossible to justify — both to others and to yourself.

Nothing terrible has happened to me, so why do I feel this way? I was never abused. I have never experienced any significant loss. I have never had to grappled with grief. I have never experienced any meaningful trauma. There’s nothing about my life that anyone would recognize as particularly difficult. There’s nothing about my life that is similar to the experiences of those from marginalized communities.

All of these thoughts contribute to a deep sense of shame, and that shame convinces you that your struggle with depression is a personal failure and not the symptom of mental illness. When you don’t have a story or narrative that explains why you feel a deep sadness or emotional pain, it makes you believe that you don’t have permission to have those thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

In many spaces, particularly within online communities and forums, emotional struggles are often expressed and understood through storytelling. People share what happened to them and describe how it changed them. They receive validation because people can trace the connection between the event and the pain, and they can empathize with that type of human experience.

However, sometimes, depression may arrive quietly, with no clear beginning or explanation, and remains with you persistently for years — sometimes a lifetime. It can remain with you, despite what to any outsider observer might seem like a relatively typical life. You can appear to experience a life without any moments of significant tragedy and many moments of relative happiness, and never give any outward indication that anyone would recognize as debilitating emotional pain.

I learned early how to hide my emotions and how to mask any symptoms of depression. Throughout my adult life, I became more adept at only letting people see what I thought they wanted to see. I convinced myself that letting people see anything else was pointless. Besides, there are far many more people that struggled with experiences that I couldn’t begin to understand, and speaking honestly and expressing any emotional pain would only appear to everyone as dramatic or ungrateful.

If I couldn’t explain the reason for my depression or share a compelling narrative for my emotional pain, then how could anyone understand? Why the fuck would anyone care?

All of this only leads to a deep sense of loneliness, and as that loneliness deepens it leads to a self imposed isolation. When you spend your time hiding from everyone, you begin to feel disconnected from both yourself and from other people. You learn to live in silence. You stop expecting anyone to reach out. You start believing that if you reached out, it would only lead to rejection.

Intellectually, I understand that depression is not always a reaction; sometimes it is a mental illness shaped by biology, chemistry, environment, personality, or countless other subtle factors that cannot easily be weaved into a single narrative. Emotionally, I’m still strugglingly to believe that this is not all somehow my fault. Despite what I have come to understand about my brain chemistry, how medications have improved my life, and everything that I have experienced in therapy, I remain unable to imagine how to accept the concept that I am someone worthy of love and compassion.

It remains a struggle for me to believe that my experience is worthy of any consideration. Sometimes, I still find myself drowning in feelings of shame and thoughts of worthlessness. Even as I write these words, there’s a voice inside my head that is saying, “What are you doing? Nobody gives a shit.”

But, from my first therapy session, I have held on to the belief that this is a process that will take time, and that I should be committed to spending as much time working on healing myself as I have spent hiding myself. Hopefully, it won’t take twenty years, but I know that if I didn’t put in the work now, I wouldn’t make it another twenty years — and life is starting to get interesting, and is full of possibility.