Spectrum_02_2022

ANIMAE LIBERAE
Text Maria Papantuono
Illustration Alyna Reading
For my dear naïve friend
y friend’s driving and I am sitting in
M the passenger seat. “I am sad sometimes,
too,” they say, focused on the car in
front of us. I, speechless, don’t know how to
react so I stay quiet. This is my answer, a few
months too late, but my dear naïve friend:
this is for you, read carefully.
Depression is not a decision you take at
7.00am when you open your eyes and you
question whether you have the strength to
get out of bed. You don’t decide to be like
this when you stare into the bathroom mirror,
empty inside, and you start following
the course of your tears as if they would
somehow show you the way. It’s not a button
you press when you try to cover your
tiredness with your pale make-up or when
you force a warm colour onto your eyelids.
You don’t consider the pros and cons when
you barely have the energy to get down
the stairs, and they start to seem endless,
like the day ahead of you. It’s not a choice
you make when you walk through the lifeless
streets, your head lowered because the
weight on your shoulders doesn’t allow you
to see the upper half, the sun, the light. All
you see is the grey street that stays the same.
You can’t say no to depression when you
try your hardest not to fall into that familiar
hole where you feel comfortable and where
you are not constantly reminded that you’ll
never be like them.
We did not choose this but it’s part of who
we are. Try to imagine the pain we have to
go through every day: people telling us to
take a walk, to sleep more, to sleep less, to
eat more, to eat less, that life’s hard, that
others have it worse, that we have a home,
friends, family, that we should be happy and
grateful, that life goes on, that everyone has
problems, people not believing us because
they can’t see the illness, not being taken
seriously, being called “lazy” and of course
the winner of the worst things you can say to a
person with depression: “I am sad sometimes,
too.”
Thank you from the community of people
“who are just sad sometimes” and in the 19th
century would have been called “melancholic”
(Edgar Allan Poe, this one’s for you).
Here's what you can do instead:
«I am sad sometimes,
too»
• Listen (really listen to what we say or what we’re trying to say)
• Don’t just assume that you know how we feel and what we’re going through
• Don’t generalise depressed people; we all experience it diffrently
• Check up on us even if we seem “fine”
• Don’t be scared to ask questions
04.22
spectrum
27