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Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression QUOTES

Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression QUOTES

1 " We are not easy to help. Nor are we easy to be around. Nobody with a serious illness is easy to be around. Although not obviously physically disabled, we struggle to get things done. Our energy levels are dangerously low. Sometimes, we find it hard to talk. We get angry and frustrated. We fall into despair. We cry, for no apparent reason. Sometimes we find it difficult to eat, or to sleep. Often, we have to go to bed in the afternoon or all day.
So do most people with a serious illness. We are no different. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

2 " Imagine saying to somebody that you have a life-threatening illness, such as cancer, and being told to pull yourself together or get over it.

Imagine being terribly ill and too afraid to tell anyone lest it destroys your career.

Imagine being admitted to hospital because you are too ill to function and being too ashamed to tell anyone, because it is a psychiatric hospital.

Imagine telling someone that you have recently been discharged and watching them turn away, in embarrassment or disgust or fear.

Comparisons are odious. Stigmatising an illness is more odious still. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

3 " A friend called the other day.
'How are you?' she said.
The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I said that I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair.
She said: 'How can you be depressed on a day like this?'
I wanted to say: 'If I had flu, would you ask me how I could be sick on a day like this? "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

4 " As to whether the depression will come back, it is every depressive's fear. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

5 " Bad enough to be ill, but to feel compelled to deny the very thing that, in its worst and most active state, defines you is agony indeed. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

6 " Sometimes I think depression should be called the coping illness. So many of us struggle on, not daring or knowing how to ask for help. More of us, terribly, go undiagnosed. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

7 " I had carried on when all I wanted was to be dead. I had stayed alive for other people. I never stayed alive for myself. I cannot begin to describe the intensity of that effort. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

8 " Wanting to die (or 'suicidal ideation'as the experts would have it) goes hand in hand with the illness. It is a symptom of severe depression, not a character failing or moral flaw. Nor is it, truly, a desire to die so much as a fervent wish not to go on living. All depressives understand that distinction. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

9 " A part of my depression lies, I think, in my unanswered question: Where is home? I feel a sense, always, of trying to find my way back to a place that doesn't exist. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

10 " The terrible truth about depression, and the part of its nature that terrifies me the most, is that it appears to operate beyond reason; feelings happen to you for no apparent cause. Or rather, there is usually an initial cause, a 'trigger'as they say in therapeutic circles, but in severe depression the feelings of sadness, grief, loneliness and despair continue long after the situation has resolved itself. It is as if depression has a life of its own, which is perhaps why so many sufferers refer to it as a living thing, as some sort of demon or beast. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

11 " I find it easy to spot a depressive. The illness is scrawled across them like graffiti. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

12 " I would not wish depression on anybody. And yet, it taught me a lot. I have not become suddenly mawkishly grateful for my life but I am more interested in it, more engaged you might say. When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in seeing the light and pleasure, above all, in the ordinary. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

13 " It is two years since I emerged from depression and I no longer want myself dead. I want myself alive. I am no longer my own enemy. Depression is the enemy. The monster lives at my gate. My hope is that, with sufficient effort and luck, I can keep it there. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

14 " Everyone else has a work party,'Kate said. 'So why shouldn't we? We're working hard at not being mad. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

15 " I often find myself grateful for the comfort of strangers; a man who gave up his seat for me on the bus, a woman who helped me out with a heavy shopping bag. Remembering small acts of kindness puts the world in a finer, sweeter order. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

16 " I believe, completely, that life is about connection; that nothing else truly matters. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

17 " Believe nothing. Try everything. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

18 " Try never to abandon hope for if you do, hope will surely try to abandon you. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

19 " When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in seeing the light and pleasure, above all, in the ordinary. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

20 " Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, "He fought so hard." And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong. "

― , Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression