I have several friends on Facebook and IRL that struggle with depression. For those friends that I am not as close with personally, I, like many of us, tend to make assumptions about other people's lives. 

 

A friend posted the image below today on Facebook. Funny thing. She seems to have it all to me. She is married to the love of her life. Plays music professionally. Travels. Seems happy....... but that's not what depression is. And I know better. It's not dependent upon external circumstances, although that certainly can enhance or dispel it. It's this shadow that follows you. Some days it is very small and you don't mind that it exists. Because you know that it is part of you. You know that you have to live with it. Some days it is large - engulfing you with waves of pain that take every breath that you have and you worry (quite seriously) whether you will live through it.

 

The irony of depression is that many of us that suffer with this have an almost inability to suppress the Self. For society often asks us to suppress our Selves..... why can't you be happy? Why can't you be positive? Why do you have to say that - say this instead. Wear your hair like this. Wear these clothes. Appear this way in public. And the ways that people wish you compromise your Self are endless.

 

Yet we continue to fight to BE who we ARE. We continue to express ourselves. Say the "wrong" things. Do the "embarrassing" things. Stand out. Shout out loud. And inevitably are told to be quiet. If you are a songwriter, you write a song with a cuss word in it (oh the horror!). Or write a song about a girl that ODs and sells herself on the street for money. Or you get onstage and tell someone that they can wait til next week for the crappy band to play the over-requested song they want to hear. You fight back because your inner soul refuses to be silenced. For the soul knows that silence in itself is death. Maybe worse. But through that fight you continue to go against the grain and be outside the "norm". Your existence becomes a challenge to everything around you. Your friction becomes stronger. Your struggle becomes even harder.

 

All of my life, I tried desperately to "fit in". It is the heart of the inspiration for a song I wrote called "Outside the Outsiders". I always wanted to be like everyone else. Not understanding that none of us are alike. And some of us are very far outside of a "norm" - unique to the point of "weird" or "strange" or "different". People that cannot accept me is still a source of constant frustration. Even though I know that they are shallow.  I know that they cannot see beyond the very small piece of real estate that they live on. They refuse to see an entire world and centuries of history and constant evolution. They see colors. They see beauty in superficiality framed in a current context. They judge. With a scale that is impossible to balance.

 

So I say to this friend whom I hardly know - Embrace your unique-ness. Embrace your bad-ness. Embrace your sad-ness. Embrace your negativity. Embrace your positive side. Be you. Be weird. Be different. But be YOU. The depression comes and goes. Yes, take care of that. Do not allow it to engulf and drown you. Because we need you. As long as you can stay with us on this planet, we need you. We don't need more people that water down their existence and silence their inner Selves to "fit in". We need YOU. That beautiful, unique, ugly, interesting, boring, amazing, horrible, incredible YOU.