The Biggest Fear That Came With Depression and Anxiety

Receiving a diagnosis of depression and anxiety can be scary on its own. It brings all these new fears with it, but I always think about one fear in particular.

I fear I may never get better.

Sure, this seems irrational. I mean, if I work on myself and doing everything I can to get better, then there is no reason I shouldn’t… right? Yet the fear is always there in the back of my mind. Here are a few reasons, if you will, why I cannot help but fear this.

1. Depression takes lives all the time.

I am not saying I am personally suicidal and want to end my life, but people all around the world are every day, and the number of people who die by suicide in a year is an absurd amount. And I’ve got to say: that is terrifying. It makes me wonder: if all of those people couldn’t fight it, then how I am going to be able to get through this? They couldn’t have had so much more going on in their lives that it was worse than what I go through, and yet they couldn’t handle it; the depression took them away.

2. Getting better is hard.

I mean, I never expected for it to be easy, but it takes so much out of you. It requires you to change the way you think, and to basically tell your brain that it’s wrong. You have to challenge all of these negative thoughts your brain is feeding you and that is not an easy thing. Sure, sometimes our brains are pretty helpful, but with depression, they do everything they can to harm us. Getting better isn’t something that just happens overnight. Getting better isn’t this linear process where as soon as you start to get better, you only continue to get better from there. It’s this long journey with highs and lows and after you’ve felt what it’s like to be OK again just to fall back down, it makes you consider why even bother trying anymore.

3. There is no “cure” for depression.

I wish with everything in me that there was a magic pill or something I could take that would take all of my depression and anxiety away. But there’s not. Of course, there is medicine out there that can help you feel back to normal, but none of it really gets rid of depression. Depression can be treated but as said in the previous point, that is not an easy thing to do, especially with the lack of motivation and desire to live that comes with depression.

4. Depression and anxiety are draining.

If you live with one or the other, or even both as I do, you are probably well aware of how draining having these illnesses can be. They cause you to worry about everything and anything there is to worry about, and they make everything seem so black and white and dark as if nothing is going to be better. They take all of your energy to do the simplest of tasks that a person not struggling could do with a lot of ease.

5. Anxiety and depression control your thoughts.

They constantly feed our brains all of these things that aren’t true. But, then the problem is that they make it to where it is hard to believe anything but the bad things they tell us. It’s hard to realize that, “hey, that’s not true, I am worth it, and I am enough,” when every time you think anything remotely positive about yourself, your anxiety and depression is like: “no, you aren’t enough, and you aren’t worth it.” There could be a million things that prove those thoughts wrong, but having to change the way you think when your brain, that is needed for thinking, is against you is one of the most difficult things in the world.

I do have this fear I might never get better or that I will have to take medication and go to therapy for the rest of my life. But, I also know that deep down, everyone has this incredible strength inside of them and if they can find it and not give up, then maybe this fear will go away.