I was diagnosed with clinical depression in September of 2004. I knew long before the day of the diagnosis that something was not quite right. With my diagnosis came a little pill I have to take every single day for the rest of my life in order to be “normal”—whatever that word means. The pill makes me feel better. It makes me able to deal with real life. It makes me function in a non-catatonic sort of way. This is not about my hatred of a pill.

Instead, this is about my wish that I had never told my family and friends* about my diagnosis. I wish I had kept my bottle of pills to myself and snuck one every morning like an addict. Maybe then I’d be allowed to have “off” days where I’m not the happiest of people, or the sanest of people, or the calmest of people. 

People who suffer from mental disease know what I’m talking about…or at least I think they do. Once people know you have a mental disease, they suddenly judge your life based on that mental disease. If we wake up on the wrong side of the bed, “Have you taken your pill today?” If we get stressed out over the amount of work that needs to be done and the amount of work that has been done, “Have you taken your pill today?” If we want to stay inside for days at a time and watch reruns in the dark, “Have you taken your pill today?”

My life is defined by days I have and have not taken my pill. I am not allowed the full spectrum of emotion that a “normal” person has. Instead, that pill is supposed to make me one type of person: happy. Forever. No need for any other sort of emotion.

Perpetually happy is impossible for me. Not because I have depression. Not because I haven’t taken my pill. Not because my mental state is fragile and cracking around the edges. But because I am human…introverted human at that.  I like simply being. And that being has nothing to do with a breakdown in my mental state and everything to do with my relief that I am still able to move through the gamut of emotions a “normal” mental state has.

My clinical depression is every much a part of me as my gender and sexual orientation. I did not choose to have a mental “disease.” It’s programmed into the electrical firings of my brain. But, I do choose to take my pill every morning. And why that is anyone’s business is beyond me. And why they think they get to fling those words around—“Did you take your pill today?”—whenever they want, that they have the right to fling those words around at me, is beyond me. I do not choose to be “crazy” (as some have put it). I choose to be human, and, in my humanity, I choose to react and feel  as a human does and should.

It would be lovely if everyone followed in kind.

**I, of course, do not mean all of my friends and family are guilty of this. But the couple who are outweigh they many who are not.