Depression is like having a huge elephant permanently living in your front room. It doesn’t give you a lot of space to live, so you have to squeeze around it as best you can. You’re constantly ducking and diving around the elephant to get to where you need to be, sometimes taking hits from flapping ears or swinging trunks. You try to push the elephant out the way with all your might, however it’s too big and weighty for how strong you are. You’ve named the elephant, accepted that it’s there, and you plead it will stay out of the way long enough for you to watch the last 10 minutes of Corrie on TV. You try to entice the elephant out of the way with some food, but it moves only inches because there is nowhere for it to go. No matter what you do to get rid of the elephant, you know it is staying put; and over time it grows – ever so slightly, so little that you don’t notice it. That is, until you think back to when it was just a small, controllable baby elephant, harbouring in one tiny corner of the room. Oh how you wish you could go back.
You realise there are only a few exits the elephant can take. If only you could somehow shrink the elephant so it could get out of a door or window. Or you could bulldoze the entire wall of the living room, although there is every chance the house could collapse on you. And the longest exit strategy is waiting – day by day, playing the waiting game until the elephant dies. But, yes, the body would still be present; it wouldn’t have exited per se.
There is one more way to get rid of the elephant; and that is by leaving the living room yourself. This room doesn’t have any ‘living’ happen in it – just a sort of limbo for people who are existing. So you decide to move rooms. This is it. Goodbye elephant. You take one last look at what was…and suddenly you don’t want to go. This elephant in this room seems like everything you’ve ever known.
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