Queerbot: Boundaries help outstep depression

At the start of my sophomore year, I shoved myself into the closet. In an attempt at Christian orthodoxy, I declared myself a non-practicing queer. I am still unsure how one is to be queer without practicing because who I am shows through in all my interactions—in the embarrassed gestures I’ll make when talking to a cute girl, in how I’ll hold her gaze a little longer.

That year, my queer side was always showing, and the more I tried to cover it up, the more it boiled over out of my self-hatred. Months of depression became suicidal thoughts by spring. I felt selfish and unjustified in my depression. After all, Columbia is a pretty queer-supportive campus, with high-visibility LBGTQ organizations and mostly open-minded students.

But depression is just as much about the unresolved past and fears for the future as it is about the present environment—if not more. “It’s not always about what people around you think,” my friend Oliver* said. He came out as gay after struggling with depression on another socially liberal campus. “It’s about what you think, and what you grew up with,” he added.

Marshall became depressed at Columbia his freshman year. In high school, he had been one of two openly gay people at his entire school. Marshall’s plans for college were to finally find a boyfriend, find awesome queer friends, and put an end to his isolation. He would find all these things in the years to come, but his first year was marked by an unexpected loneliness.

Depression can isolate someone even in the midst of caring people. When I was depressed, I felt myself to be sapped of all the qualities that had once made me worth other people’s company. I worried about being a burden on others and felt terrified that others resented me for it. It was difficult to ask others for help, especially when I needed to ask for it every day.

To cope, it can be helpful for depressed individuals to develop codes and rituals with their loved ones. Friends of Beckett, who deals with chronic depression, know that he needs their help as soon as he Twitters anything about a beached whale. To alleviate depressive fears that my friends didn’t really care about me, I trained my close friends to throw in the phrase “It’s good to see you” whenever they hung out with me. The very fact that they would remember made their affection real to me.

Invented rules and structures are helpful in dealing with depression, which otherwise wrecks all order and encourages anarchy, especially when it comes to relationship boundaries. “If I had one piece of advice to give a couple trying to get through this, it’s this: There are certain things that you cannot tell your partner,” Beckett said. “There’s a reason why you have a therapist, and there’s a reason why you have a partner, and the two are not interchangeable, even if it can feel like that sometimes.”

A lover should not aim to get inside of a depressed person’s head—success can be a terrifying violation of mental boundaries. Instead, the focus should be on maintaining a healthy relationship in which lovers can communicate their needs to one another.

It can be extraordinarily difficult for a depressed person to express needs and wants, to feel he deserves to have them met, or to even articulate them for himself in the first place. All a lover can do in this situation is to ask what the depressed person needs.

It’s also important for the lover of a depressed person to set boundaries—a safe, yet affectionate, mental distance and enough time outside of the relationship to be alone, live the rest of his or her life, and seek support.

For the depressed person, taking the initial step to get help and enter treatment is always difficult—and the work only begins there. Questions of identity drive the process of recovery. Which personality traits are one’s own, and which belong to depression? Also, what values and habits will have a place in building a new self? My depression forced me out of the closet, into honesty with myself. Today, out as bisexual and proud, I wish I hadn’t had to fight so hard for myself.

I wish the pain of depression on no one. But for those of us who struggle, I know we are worth the fight.

*all names changed

Lucy Sun is a Columbia College senior majoring in economics. Queerbot runs alternate Fridays.