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Depression is like rolling a dice, you never know which side of it you’ll get. All 6 sides hold different dangers and truth be told they’re all pretty equally sucky to go through. Side number 1 is the side in which everything feels heavy and dark and like you’re a bird drowning in the sky or a fish trying to fly in the sky; it’s the uphill, never-winning battle that we continue to fight because it’s the only way. Side number one teaches you how to stay strong and adapt. Side number 2 is the sadness, my god that sadness, the sadness that rips through you like a tornado and leaves you shaking and scared and of course sobbing; it’s the sadness that makes you envy the drowning birds and falling fish. Side number 2 shakes the world beneath your feet but you won’t fall, you’ll go through a bunch of kleenexes and need a helluva lot of comfort food and romantic comedies but the tears’ll stop and you’ll be able to breathe again. Side number 3 is the lazy side, the side where your body fuses to the mattress and your head is just not cooperating today; the side where you just want the world to go away so you can sleep it all away and wake up in 10 years time. But despite side number 3’s best efforts, get up, take the dog for a walk, grab a cup of coffee, enjoy some sunlight even if it’s only for 10 minutes - use all the energy you’ve got that day just to defy it. Side number four is the rage, the anger that boils up inside the sadness, the nostalgia, the madness of being trapped in this illness; the anger that leads to cutting, drinking, smoking dope, writing angry poems, cursing, and hurting the people we love. Side number four is painful and you’ll regret it tomorrow but you’ve got to remember that, although it’s no excuse, it wasn’t you talking - it was the depression. The real, mood-altering, mind-controlling, life-damaging illness. Forgive yourself for the snide comments or cynical retorts. Side 5 is the side no one talks about, for reasons unknown to me, because it is perhaps the hardest side to face when you get it, it’s the darkness - the point in which you just wanna curl up and let it all collapse around you because then at least it would end, it’s the side that makes you feel indifferent, numb, and guilty for not seeing any light because there’s always a light right? Someone always has it worse and here you are hiding underneath your covers like some damsel in distress, wrong - side five is the hardest because it makes you feel bad about your illness, guilty about it and it makes you question its validity, which for the record is very fucking valid. Side number six is the side which everyone doesn’t understand, it’s the unknown or the other side; this is the side where you’ll be perfectly content, laughing with friends over ice cream or something equally delicious when you just stop because depressions snatched your laugh from you, when your going through your checklist for college in target and break down in the towel aisle because college is too far away and you don’t think you’ll make it, when you’re on a bus to somewhere and you see someone with scars on their arms and although you shouldn’t assume - you know where they came from and you know that pain all too well, when you watch a little kid being happy and high on life and get so goddamn down because they’ll have to face the music one day and you remember that day for you. Side 6 is all the others mixed together, at the unexpected, most unwanted times. So yes, of course, depression’s a bitch and it’s an illness struggled with by so many in so many ways. But depression, on any given day, is the luck of the draw. Will you get a semi-survivable day? Or will you get a day with suicidal thoughts and surprise mood swings and stress out of this world? We don’t get to choose what day it’ll be, we just get to choose how we respond and how much power we go into battle with. - We don’t get to choose when we get depressed or how, it’s chance.