A picture of me

I addressed the rest of what you said in other comments.

If you're currently able to do CrossFit though, then I would never refer to you as or consider you to be currently depressed.

Nobody wants to be on meds their whole life.

Nobody.

Why do people always assume I and others like me “took the easy way out” and always say “well did you just try exercise/sunlight/chakra/insertdietyhere??”

Before I finally got a doctor that could help I was tormented by people like you because I thought I wasn’t good enough. Everyone else does these things and they’re “cured.” Why can’t I do it? Their response every single time was disbelief. “You’re just not trying hard enough.”

Just.

Just.

Just.

Just.

I’ve grown to hate that word. People that say it tend to enjoy being dismissive of real problems. I honestly don’t care to look thru your comment history, but I know the odds are pretty high I’ll see that language over and over… The thing is, my experience isn’t even unique. It’s super common. Yet there’s always people like you that try their best to make us feel like we aren’t doing enough and it’s our own fault. The odds are the person you’re talking to is not a complete and total idiot and they already tried everything up to and sometimes including shoving Gwyneth Paltrow “healing crystals” up their vagina before trying meds. I’m incredibly fortunate medication was able to sort of help. I can at least tolerate life and be somewhat hopeful for my future. Not everyone is so lucky. My brother, for instance, is suffering from treatment resistant depression. My family are all trying to figure out how to help him before it’s too late. If I heard you or anyone say “did you just try exercising” to him in my presence, I’d find it exceedingly difficult to not break your nose, because I know how much that kind of talk will make him bed-ridden and suicidal.

Plenty of people who suffer from depression are able to do things.

it took me probably 7 years after moving out of my parent’s place to learn that “smalltalk” and “idle chitchat” are not necessarily the same thing. the “aha!” moment was attending a conference with a much older coworker and seeing him strike up conversations with the people sitting next to him which in the course of 15 minutes went from surface level to incredibly personal, sometimes philosophical things that i would never have thought a stranger willing to discuss, prior to that.

in my taxonomy, “idle chitchat” is talking about things. “smalltalk” is learning about each other. “the weather sure is nice today, isn’t it?” => idle chitchat. you’re not likely to understand a person from that starting point, except that “wow look, we both like the sun”. “where are you from? what brings you here?” => smalltalk. you’re encouraging the person to reveal some small amounts of information about themselves which you can use to probe further and hopefully find something fascinating (about them, about a topic you haven’t thought much about, or about yourself and how you relate to something in contrast to them).

now i take conversations with strangers (or anyone really) as a sport, as a challenge. “how can i use these precious moments we strangers share to discover something new? to leave one of us pondering something novel later in the evening”. sometimes these lead to lasting friendships, usually not. but still frequently beneficial to my life. important to identify the situations where smalltalk has the possibility of going beyond surface-level things though. an elevator ride — probably not. a conference, a party, a group activity, anything where people have already put themselves out there more than normal — seems to select for people more likely to “get” smalltalk, or maybe it primes them to open up more, idk.

Hear hear. I do this only so people feel like they have the 5 minutes of attention they want from me and then they feel it's okay to leave me alone.