Depression is a funny thing.

I’m hella depressed, if you don’t mind me using a clinical term. This isn’t a revelation – I’ve been depressed before, and then I wasn’t, and now I am again. 

“Depressed” is actually the perfect word for it, if you think about it etymologically. A state of being pressed down… like a button under a thumb, or your tongue right before a laryngoscope’s light probes your throat. Depression holds back – pushes down – the parts of your personality that make you you, and that was certainly the case for me. 

In a lot of ways, I do feel pushed down. But, in one very specific way, I feel strangely more myself when I’m depressed. 

In short, I’m way funnier.

I was first diagnosed with depression in early 2017. After an hour and a half in a waiting room that I’m wholly convinced was designed to push people already perilously close to the edge into a full-on psychotic breakdown, my psychiatrist guided me through a rapid-fire series of “How pitiful are you, exactly?” questions: 

Have any loved ones died in recent years? Yes. 

Have you ever been sexually assaulted? Yup. 

Have you found yourself unable to sleep, or sleeping too much? Check, and check.

Have you completely stopped giving any effs about most everything that has ever brought you joy in this world? I felt seen. 

She recommended medication, and I knew it was the right call. I got better. I felt well again.

Well enough, in fact, that after recovering from an early miscarriage via accidental conception (my husband’s super sperm: 3 / Nuvaring: 0) we decided to deliberately try for a second baby. I quit the meds cold turkey, which I would not recommend unless searing flashes of pain piercing your brain from time to time are your thing. 

I was surprised to find during my pregnancy and for months after my son’s birth that the depression hadn’t returned… and then it did.

“Get down and stay down,” depression says. And I obliged. I stayed in bed. I stayed out of work. I stayed away from happy hours and brunches. Being around friends and family — which, as a pronounced extrovert, had always recharged my batteries — became unfathomably exhausting. But when I did venture out, I noticed something I hadn’t before: I was getting a lot more laughs.

You see, there’s something very stark about depression. It makes the sufferer see things plainly, without the rose-colored glasses normal serotonin and dopamine production provides. Situations that would have otherwise been clouded by assumed good intentions, well-crafted messaging, or situational nuance are simply laid bare. What once seemed gray now appears in unsettling black and white. The bullshit veil is lifted. 

For those naturally afflicted with a “call it like I see it” mentality, this effect is heightened. In my case, it means I say exactly what I think, exactly how I think it. And people. Eat. It. Up. If there’s one thing I’ve learned through this experience, it’s that people love a devil-may-care attitude paired with timely, reverent subjects. 

Sometimes I’m self-deprecating. Other times I’m snarky about others. Occasionally I’m maniacally passionate. Mostly, I’m flippant.

It’s like my give-a-damn filter, already threadbare and held together by old bubble gum, completely vanishes. When I’m depressed, I just don’t care about anything – including and especially what people think about me, my thoughts, and my opinions. 

In one way, this is wildly liberating. For as long as I can remember, I’ve harbored a distinct desire to tell everyone to go to hell alongside a sometimes debilitating need for people to like me. Stripping away that need has allowed me to explore my true feelings unencumbered, and to test them out on unwitting audiences without regard for how they may be received. I liked it. 

Nope. I loved it. 

So, when my symptoms returned – the lack of interest, intense lethargy, and inability to form even somewhat cogent sentences quickly – I found myself conflicted for the first time about seeking help. The depression was the same, but this time I felt different about it. I didn’t especially want to go back on the meds, but I made the appointment anyway. 

My new psychiatrist, a warm, squat Indian man with sympathetic eyebrows and orthopedic shoes chatted about my first bout of depression, and the meds I’d taken then. I mumbled a weak joke about what I call my CelexaColada – my beloved citalopram-Wellbutrin cocktail – which landed like a condom on prom night.  

“This is very serious,” he remarked without looking up from his notes. I nodded… seriously. 

At the end of the session, he wrote me a prescription. After I left his office, scrip in hand, I sat in my car and opened Facebook for some pre-drive scrolling. The very first post made me cackle like a jackass.

“Laughter is the best medicine.”

If that ain’t funny, I don’t know what is.