Coming from someone who has depression, I think a really helpful tip, like a helpful perspective would be that it's not always going to be like this. You're gonna have your hard days, you're gonna have your really good days, but you're always going to be able to find the light at the end of the tunnel, and so there's always some relief that will come with your depression, and it's not going to be like this forever.
One of the best things with depression is learning how to be really mindful of your scenario. A lot of times as we grow up we have these ideas of who we think we are, what we think makes us happy, and in reality our ideas can be sometimes wrong. I'll give a personal example. I used to always think I loved playing video games, and I still love playing video games, but after I took a step back there would be times where I realized I'd been playing video games for hours and hours, and I realized I wasn't happy. And on the flip side of that, there were times when I'd go play sports, and I always thought I wasn't that big of a sports fan, when whenever I would actually pay attention to my feelings, I realized I was loving it. I was having a great time. So be willing to be mindful, and take who you think you normally are, and just take a step back. Say, is what I'm doing right now actually making me happy? Do I enjoy this? And take a note of that. If you do, keep doing it. Do it more often. If you don't, maybe find some things to substitute it with.
When my depression started, it was pretty bad. People kept telling me, you know, it's going to get better, it's going to get better. And I mean, it sounded trite at the time, but it's, it has gotten better over time. And yeah, that's, that's the advice I give. Not very like revolutionary or anything, but yeah, it gets better.
What I find helpful with depression is just taking one day at a time and looking forward to the good times and knowing that there are good times, not only bad times.
Something that I have thought about with depression is I kind of started to allow it to become part of my identity and part of like who I was and I think that that's not the case. I think that I am bigger than my depression and it's just something that I've experienced and it's something that I've gone through and I've learned from it and I love sharing about my experiences with it but it's not who I am and there's so much else, so many other experiences, so many other things that make me who I am, not just depression. It's not something that I've learned throughout my experience with depression.