Battling Depression & Learning to Lean on Yourself
How to ditch the discomfort of being alone and step into your own strength.
In my “research” (aka “Google rabbit hole”) of trying to figure out “how to overcome depression”, I found one tip in common between most of the articles:
“Talk to someone”.
The advice of these articles was to push yourself to talk about your depression, not keep it to yourself, and not let the shame make you retreat into silence.
This is usually accompanied by statements like “You don’t have to do it alone” or “Reach out to your support system”; advice that speaks to people who are prone to suffering in solitude.
The only problem with this advice:
What if you already talk about your depression?
The Habit of Leaning on Others
I have been battling depression ever since I can remember.
At age ten, I remember being on the ferry on my way from Orcas Island, Washington to Anacortes. Two people — at different times–approached me to ask, “Are you okay, darling? You look sad.” Yep. That’s me.
In high school, I battled suicidal ideation and anxiety. Knowing that my mom struggled with anxiety and depression herself, I told her about what I called my “dark thoughts” right away.
In college, I confided in my best friends, was open about when I was having a depressive episode, and reached out when I needed someone to cry with when I was having suicidal thoughts. I knew I always had someone to talk to. Someone to distract me from the pain.
Truth is, I have always been open about my battle with depression. My story is not one of suffering in silence.
Quite the opposite.
It’s one of leaning on others.. perhaps when I should be learning to lean on myself.
Leaning Too Hard, Falling Too Far
It wasn’t until the past year or so that I realized how heavily I have been leaning on other people.
What started out as momentary distractions had turned into turning my friends, family, and partners into emotional crutches.
And what happens when you lean on imperfect people for your emotional well-being? Eventually, they get drained trying to support the weight of your depression — and, possibly, their own.
Overstaying Your Welcome
When someone truly loves you, they want you to be happy, healthy, and fulfilled.
Late in 2018, I met someone who I now know loves me unconditionally.
Through my recent journey, she became an idealized beacon of strength, self-awareness, and self-confidence.
My subconscious mind was like “Finally! A stable, sturdy place to land”.
She became my emotional support. My confidant. The person I bounced my worries, hopes, insecurities, and dreams off of.
Little did I realize that the weight of my traumas, issues of self-worth, and fears about love and trust were too much for her to carry.
I thought I had found someone strong enough for me to lean on indefinitely. But the thing about strong people is that they know their boundaries. They know when to say no. And they know how to practice tough love.
I had overstayed my welcome. And this time, I was truly alone.
Stop Talking… Learning to Listen.
My usual habit of turning outward for support wasn’t working. I had become an emotional vampire — sucking the strength out of other people. Note that I also had little awareness of what they were going through in their lives.
This hit hard when I had three friends (on different occasions) reach out to me to say:
Jess, I feel like you’ve been so wrapped up in your own world lately. I feel like you haven’t created space for other people. What about me?
That hurt. My best friends were telling me that all I did was complain about my depression — rarely stopping to ask how they were doing.
Further, it triggered my insecurities about being “too much” for people, being too weak to take care of myself, and being too selfish to be a good friend.
I was doing all the talking. I wasn’t listening.
In this habit, I was putting the weight of my depression onto other people, thinking it was too much for me to bear alone. But there is a line between talking about your depression… and dumping it onto others.
In the moment, it feels cathartic. In the long-run, it’s crippling.
Because I wasn’t exercising the practice of self-love. Leaning on myself. Learning to be ok even when I wasn’t ok. I was seeking out bandaid solutions rather than getting to the root of the problem.
How to Learn to Lean on Yourself
This article is not a fully realized guide on how to stop leaning on others in order to truly learn how to love and lean on yourself.
That’s because I, like all people, am a work in progress. The things I outline here will take practice. I have not yet reached the light at the end of the tunnel.
Perhaps you don’t keep your depression to yourself. Perhaps you are, instead, that person who leans.
You tell people about your struggles and have come to rely on them for support.
You are scared that you can’t do it alone.
You doubt your own strength.
You worry that you won’t be able to make it without someone propping you up.
You’re terrified that you will off yourself under the weight of handling your depression by yourself.
I hear you.
This is me. But I am starting to believe there is a way out. Go on this journey with me.
1. Sit with Your Bullshit
Some of the hardest moments are when we feel overwhelmed with our negative and anxious thoughts and feel the need to reach out to someone else for relief.
While for some people this can be healthy, when it becomes a habit, it becomes numbing. The result is us always turning to other people to pull us out of a dark space.
But what if we sat with this bullshit for a moment? Truly felt our feelings in all their terrifyingness, darkness, sadness, and loneliness?
What if we feel it, acknowledge it, and let it pass?
My thoughts? Facing the fears and moving past it would validate our own strength.
Every time we go into the darkness and come out on the other side is confirmation that we are stronger than we think we are.
It’s confirmation that we can rely on ourselves even when we think we can’t.
As a practice, this looks like us laying in our scary thoughts, fully feeling them, and waiting for them to pass without us instantly reaching out to other people.
It involves us bearing the weight on our own, lifting it up, and moving on.
It involves us exercising our own strength until leaning on ourselves (not other people) becomes second nature. And reaching out to people when we want to, not because we feel like we have to.
Over time, I think we will grow to become more confident in our own strength. And know that every depressive episode passes.
2. Practice Daily Acts of Self-Devotion
When we are feeling down, depressed, and dark, our habit is to look for bandaid solutions to help us feel better.
This can even take the form of “self-care” — ie little things like bubble baths and exercise to distract us from our despair.
My problem with “self-care” in this regard is that it’s often not a sustainable solution. For healthy people, it can be. For sick people (depression is an illness) it can become another crutch.
Instead, I want us to think in terms of “acts of self-devotion”.
This is a time when we truly focus on ourselves, even if it’s not pretty, “self-care-y”, or Instagram-worthy.
It’s not a time to distract ourselves from the real work that needs to be done. It’s time to contemplate. Talk to ourselves. Get our hands dirty.
To me, this can take many forms. The point is the intention.
The intention isn’t to relax or to clear our head. It’s to focus on ourselves. Talk positively to ourselves. Practice self-love
Set aside some time for yourself every day to tell yourself that you matter. You don’t need anyone else to tell you that. It’s time to practice telling yourself that.
Be devoted to yourself by making time for you. Be devoted to telling yourself how awesome you are, how worth it it is to do things you enjoy, and that it matters that you exist in this world.
It’s when you start believing it that true change happens.
3. Care Enough to Ask About Other People
In our habit of leaning on others, we have likely neglected our most meaningful relationships.
Our friends, family members, and partners have become our emotional dumping grounds. And they may be tired. They may have very real struggles we haven’t bothered to ask about.
It’s time to get intentional about caring about other people.
It’s time to recognize that we have strength and support to give.
It’s hard to believe that we are strong when we are constantly leaning on other people. But it can be super uplifting when we are able to help others. It confirms that we do have something positive to contribute.
Take yourself out of your head and reach out to important people in your life to ask how they are doing. Offer support, love, and advice.
I know you can do it. We always surprise ourselves.
A friend says, “Wow. Thank you for talking to me today. I really needed that”
or
Our partner acknowledges us with a “I actually was having a bad day. I’m glad I can always talk to you”.
This feedback validates our strength. It flies in the face of our self-doubt about being worth anything or strong enough to lift other people up.
Sometimes we forget how strong we are. That people appreciate the support, love, and positivity we bring to their lives. Yes, even when we are depressed.
My best friend recently told me:
“I’m not your friend because of how you ‘help’ me. I’m your friend because of the joy you bring to my life. You make me laugh. You’re a true friend.”
another told me:
“You’re stronger than you know. I don’t think you tell yourself that enough”.
Be the friend you want to be. Give to other people. Love them like they love you.
Do this and not only will your relationships become stronger — more balanced — but you’ll start remembering how strong you are.
And when you remember that, you’ll be better equipped to be strong for yourself.
4. Know that it’s OK Not to Be OK
Depression is shitty. It’s dark. It’s an illness. It’s scary. It’s lonely AF.
It is okay to acknowledge this. It’s also ok not to be ok.
We try so hard to be better, but it persists. We look for a way out.
But what ends up happening is we focus too much on how bad things are and fight ourselves to exhaustion.
But when we tell ourselves that it’s ok not to be ok, the fight is no longer about “getting out” or “escaping” depression.
Instead, it becomes about acceptance.
We accept that this is our battle. That struggle is part of the human experience. That maybe we were dealt a shitty card in life, but that we are still here, doin’ the damn thing.
Some days will be really hard. But we need to try not to be our own worst enemy. That’s not fair. And it’s not productive.
We need to stop beating ourselves up for having a bad day, week, month, or year. Depression is an illness that works on the mind, tells us lies, and makes us not want to live anymore. WE are not doing that. The illness is.
Instead, we should be our own best friend. We need to learn to comfort ourselves and say “You’re super strong. You’re doing this. It’s ok that you’re not ok. Some days are better than others”.
We need that person in our lives. And that person can and should be us.
We can validate ourselves by acknowledging our pain but then tell ourselves that we will keep moving forward no matter what.
We’ll end up living with our depression instead of constantly fighting it (which is exhausting).
We’ll end up giving ourselves compassion and the self-love we need to keep going.
We’ll give ourselves peace knowing that WE are not fighting ourselves. That we have an illness and that we are working through it.
That is empowering. That we are still here and that WE have held ourselves up for this long. We can keep doing this.
It’s ok not to be ok. But you’re kicking ass at not being ok. Every day, you prove to yourself that you are in charge, not your depression.
Keep being that boss.
5. Be Selfish, the Healthy Way
In leaning on other people, we have learned to be selfish by putting the weight of our depression onto other people without considering how heavy that weight can be.
It’s rarely out of actual selfishness that we do this; rather, the fear that we aren’t strong enough to hold the weight on our own.
But either way, we learn that other people are there to care for us and that we aren’t able to reciprocate.
Let’s shift it.
Instead, let’s learn to be selfish in a healthier way.
We can do this by checking out when we need to. By going “off the grid”, so to speak.
Now, this is NOT the best approach for people with depression who already struggle to reach out for support. WE don’t have that problem; if anything, we tend to reach out too much.
We need to practice being alone. Turning off social media. Stop looking for distractions. Stop overwhelming ourselves with activities.
We need to shut down. Set boundaries. Be in solitude.
This is to prove to ourselves that we CAN be ok alone.
We can learn to self-soothe. We can start developing tools for how to care for ourselves. We’ll learn what it looks like to be truly alone and still win the battle.
This lie that we need other people is so pervasive.
It’s depression’s way of telling us that we are weak. That we won’t be okay on our own.
But people, everywhere, are alone every day. The difference is that we have an illness that makes being alone scary.
But when we PRACTICE being alone, we get better at it. When we check out from time to time and make it through a dark period, we become more confident that we can do it over and over again.
We have everything we need in order to take care of ourselves during those moments. We just need to exercise them. That routine starts now.
When you feel overwhelmed and inclined to reach for your phone — hoping to numb the sadness/loneliness with social media or talking to people — instead, consider checking out.
See what you learn about yourself. Lean into the darkness. Be selfish by taking care of yourself.
Like a muscle, this exercise will help you (and me) become stronger. Over time, it will become easier to be alone and to lean on ourselves.
My goal is to create a treasure trove of tools, strength, and self-love I can lean on when I get in a dark place.
Every time we practice this type of selfishness, we add more to that stockpile of self-support.
It’s not going to happen overnight. But it will happen.
Check out. Practice. Be alone. Self soothe. Reflect. Strengthen. Move forward.
Self-Love is the Ultimate Source of Strength
We have this pervasive habit of leaning on other people. But that’s a lot for someone else to bear. Eventually, as time has shown, we overstay our welcome and that source of strength can crumble out from under us.
But each of us has our own source of infinite strength. Depression just makes us forget it. It lies to us by saying “You’re weak. You can’t be alone. You need someone else to hold you up”.
Don’t believe it.
We need to love ourselves enough to say, “You know what… no. I am strong. I’m doing this. I’ve been doing this. I’m killing it”.
Self-love will be our ultimate source of strength. Not other people. Us. We can do it.
If may not feel like it right now, but with practice, it will.
We just need to remind ourselves by:
- Sitting with our bullshit
- Practicing self-devotion every day
- Showing care to other people
- Knowing it’s ok not to be ok
- and Practicing healthy “selfishness” by checking out when we need to
Over time, we won’t feel like we have to lean on other people. We’ll be able to reach out to them in a healthy way. When we want to. And our relationships will be better for it.
We’ll be confident in leaning on ourselves because we’ll know we are strong enough to handle it, even on the darkest days.
We have more strength than we realize. We don’t realize it because depression lies to us every day.
But, today, we got a reminder that we are absolutely depression-ass-kicking badasses. That we are strong enough to carry on, lean on ourselves, show love to other people, and live a life that shines bright in the face of depression.
