47 L.J. (Marmorstein) Stevens The other day, as I was taking my morning medication in the afternoon (I’d overslept as usual), my nine-year-old nephew appeared in the kitchen doorway. I jumped—I hadn’t known he was visiting—and spilled the glass of water I’d been holding down the front of my pajamas. “Oh! Hi there! You startled me!” “Hey, Aunt Laurie. What’s that medicine for?” “Oh, this?” I looked down at the pills in my hand. They were antidepressants, but I didn’t know how to explain that to a child who had probably never even heard of depression before. All I could think of to say was “Don’t worry about it.” “Okay! I hope you feel better soon.” Tony wandered out of the kitchen, leaving me alone to take my medicine. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my diagnosis—recurrent major depressive disorder–meant it was possible that I wouldn’t feel better ever again. When my grandma was alive, she called her antidepressants “happy pills.” That was a simple explanation I probably could have given to Tony—depression makes you sad, antidepressants make you happy again—but succinct as it was, it was incomplete. It’d be a better world if it really were that simple. *** Depression is sometimes defined as extreme or persistent sadness. When I first became depressed, I probably would have used that definition myself. When I was twelve years old, I woke up one morning feeling sad for no particular reason, and I never quite got over it. The sadness didn’t bother me initially. There’s a certain kind of pleasure in feeling sorry for oneself, and in middle school, it’s easy to believe that pain and sadness are profound and meaningful emotions. But the enjoyment I had fromwallowing in my own misery was brief. After months, I completely lost the ability to cry. And not long afterwards, I couldn’t feel sad anymore even if I wanted to. I couldn’t feel anything, even if I wanted to. All that was left was a vague sense of boredom and disappointment–an emptiness that would consume me for the next ten years of my life. Depression isn’t only a kind of sadness. Depression is what happens when sadness grows like a tumor, swallowing all the other emotions in the mind before cannibalizing itself. happy pi lls
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