The Face of Depression

Often times when people hear that I struggle with depression, they are surprised, because I seem like a happy person.  While my natural self is cheerful, the darkness I face makes it very difficult to feel the emotion of happiness, and putting a smile on my face is simply my way of coping with it most of the time.  The truth is, there isn’t really a “face” for depression.  It’s hard to see who is struggling with our normal eyes, as there isn’t a literal cloud of darkness that hovers above anyone’s head.  When I see these three pictures of myself, I see right through my smile, because I remember what was going on inside my mind.  I remember the internal battle that weighed so heavily on my heart, and I know that my smile was a “coping” smile in that moment.

In the first picture, my husband had just gotten home from school and found me laying in the middle of our living room floor crying with wadded up tissues all around me.  I had been in that same position for over an hour and couldn’t find the strength to get up or stop crying.  When he saw me, he immediately helped me up, brought me to the couch, and we talked.  When I was feeling a little bit better, he told me that he needed to take pictures for his humanities class, and he wanted to take pictures of me.  We went outside to take pictures, and our kind neighbor offered to take a family picture of us.  We hurried, posed, smiled, and took the picture.

The second picture was shortly after we moved to Post Falls.  I had been facing deep darkness that whole week, and just a few hours before, I had prayed and said that I had nothing left to offer and I had to give in.  I imagined that I would never be able to get up again, until our friends came to babysit so my husband and I could go on a date.  I remember climbing the stairs up to this spot with great difficulty and then my husband telling me that I should turn around and smile.  The darkness was suffocating around me.  It pressed on my heart in a way that made it physically strenuous to breath.  I wanted to cry.  It felt like my tears were moments from bursting out, yet I turned around and smiled anyway.

The third picture was this last weekend.  No one knew, but all day at church that day, I thought there was no way I could continue fighting this battle.  I felt all alone and defeated.  I wasn’t sure whether I should contemplate giving up or being admitted to the hospital, but either way, the struggle was intense and great that day.

I guess my hope with sharing these three pictures and the background story is to offer the reminder that you never know what battle someone is facing, even if they have a smile on their face.  The smile may just be a way of covering up a pain that is too difficult to share.