Quotes from John Moe

I didn't want to die, but I wanted to take my brain out of my head for a while.

If you give me enough years and a wise wife, I can eventually start piecing things together. And it helps if that wife pieces them together for me and simply tells me.

By applying actual words with significant specific diagnostic meanings to much lighter circumstances, people are robbing and devaluing people with mental illness.

My unique brand of depression responds to stress; specifically, it blows up under stress. When the going gets tough, I don't get amped up, I get despondent

As a generation, as a society, we never talk about the shit that went down with the fear of nuclear war. Not really. We'll laugh about how scary The Day After was, but we never recognize that we were raised in despair and probably handed it down to our kids and to later versions of ourselves.

If you're depressed on top of that, and you probably are, you build those walls thicker, stronger, and higher because being let down is the only feasible outcome of a relationship.

For a depressed person, there's something reorienting about a crisis. It reminds you there's a world outside your head. Instead of fretting over the future or stewing over the past, you have something new to put in the brain.

Friends, there is nothing more intoxicating for a depressed person with an alcoholic parent in his past than being told you are loved and wanted.

One of the first issues I wanted to tackle was this habit of converting stress into bleak, goth-eyeliner-wearing despair.

You can't achieve your way to happiness. You can't win your way out of depression. This does not prevent smart people from thinking that way.

It was the first family-related encounter I could think of that didn't involve a hint of secrets or sadness lurking below the surface.

It wasn't you. You didn't choose this. No one would ever choose this. It's not your fault.

Depression is good at making you think it's not even there and that you are the problem. Depression wants you to think you made a choice to be this way.

What do you have to be stressed about?" the normies might have said, if I ever talked about these things with normal people. "You have a family, a house, a car, a good job. Just deal with it!" As if I could simply do that. As if I chose this. As if I looked at the options available to me and they were clearly labeled "Perseverance" and "Freaking the Fuck Out All the Time" and calmly said, "Mmm, yes, I select option B.

Trauma occurs when something happens that's too horrible for your brain to deal with, so you just store it away. Over time, the horrible thing, which is still there, starts coming out in a variety of ugly ways, causing mental problems that you don't even associate with the trauma because it happened so long ago.

Depression steals your ability to feel happy and proud even at the moments you should be happiest and proudest.

If more people understand the reality of mental illness and get disabused of the Hollywood myths about it, the stigma about getting help will diminish, and then we'll live in a healthier society.

Depression lies," said Jenny Lawson . "Because every single time, it says, 'You'll never come out of this again. You are absolutely worthless, your family is better off without you.' And then I remind myself depression lies. Those things are lies.

Only decades later would it dawn on me that normal people who never deal with depression have a sense of self-worth automatically. Just by being a person on the earth, they feel themselves worthy of respect and love and all that other cool stuff.

Only by being useful or talented, and receiving external recognition, would I achieve personhood. I couldn't imagine a world where I was a worthwhile person by dint of mere existence; I felt like I needed to earn it and prove it every day. Don't worry, this feeling went away after only several decades.

Depression does its damage and then it hides, covering its tracks, making you think that it is not an illness, that you're just bad and weird.

Talking about depression is great and healthy, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting.

For saddies, encouragement is revelatory. Rather than making their resolve stronger, it will implant a resolve where none had been. "Because this person believes in me," the saddie thinks, "and this person is not me, they may have a point.

I didn't know that depression isn't a mood. It's a set of conditions that cause a whole series of thoughts and behaviors to happen over a long period of time, often things that are wildly different from one another.