Depression in my relationship...

First off, there's no plan for this post. Take it as it comes; it will be a ramble, a potential rollercoaster of emotions, and it probably won't be pretty. As you may know, both myself and my girlfriend suffer from depression. We've both been pretty open about it on our blogs and I thought I'd carry on the conversation today. We were actually diagnosed with depression around the same time, although we didn't meet each other 'til a few months later.

Having depression yourself is torture, but watching the person you're in love with suffer from it too is something so much worse than that. It's frustrating, knowing that they deserve the world and you can offer them no more solace than the corner of a rose garden, dodging your own thorns along the way. It's exhausting in a way that sleeping becomes something that's always just out of your grasp, as you learn to fight your own nightmares and their's too, and your bed never feels as comfortable when they're not there. It breaks your heart watching them battle the shadows in their head and in their heart, as they dip in and out of brightness alongside you, sometimes at the same time but more often than not, at completely different times.

It's one of the worst feelings, knowing that love alone can't fix somebody's problems. But that's not to say love isn't important - because it is, vastly so. I adore Sam, and I know how important it is to remind her of that every day. Laughing together and getting to see the way her eyes light up when I listen to her tell me a funny story or talking about something that she's passionate about, is one of the things I love the most in life. Reading her blog posts and stories, looking at her artwork, listening to her sing in the bath, feeling her heartbeat against mine, having her wash my hair in the shower - they're the simple things that I love about her. She's incredibly talented, more intelligent than most people and the strongest person I've ever met. Loving her is the easiest thing in the world; depression makes it hard to love and be loved, but not when it comes to Sam.

Meeting Sam has changed my life in the best way: it's made me want to get better. I still have days that are so awful I want the ground to swallow me up, but hearing her voice somehow makes everything okay. She's given me a reason to keep going, a reason to get out of bed in the morning, a reason to go out and do stuff if only to make her proud of me. She makes me want to be a better person, and I'm so grateful to have met her.

I love you, Sam.

Mental illnesses are not adjectives.

I'll start off by saying that this post is a rant, something I needed to get off my chest, feel free to just click off the page but I just wanted to write this all down somewhere coherently, rather than cramming it into 140 characters. 

Having been diagnosed with depression, I know first-hand what it's like to suffer from a mental illness and therefore I know exactly how it feels when people belittle and undermine what it's like to go through something like this. It's astounding that in 2015 we are still required to remind various people that mental illnesses are real illnesses, and are just as valid as having any other medical condition.

One aspect of the ignorance surrounding mental illnesses which I'm specifically going to talk about today is the way people, both on the internet and in 'real life' (by which I just mean offline...) use mental illnesses as adjectives, to describe how they're feeling on a particular day, or the manner in which they do something.

So often I see teenagers tweeting things like "Omg I'm so bipolar, I woke up in a foul mood but I'm well happy now!" / "This essay is making me depressed" / "Omg my mum makes me wanna kill my self..." / "It's only 10am and I want my lunch, I'd be a terrible anorexic!" / "Omg I'm soooo OCD about my desk being neat" and so on, and so forth, you get the gist of what I'm trying to depict - I hope.

Not only is it downright offensive to say this sort of thing, it also shows that you are, as a human being, grossly uneducated. It shows that you don't care enough about the people around you to even try and understand how it feels to genuinely want to kill yourself, or to genuinely suffer from an eating disorder. Empathy is clearly something which our generation lacks, because people brush off these sorts of illnesses so casually that is it any wonder they aren't taken seriously?!

Every time I see or hear somebody say something like this, it riles me so much - I don't often argue with them, purely because I don't want to 'go on' about my depression, and there are many people I simply don't want to tell (yet, or ever). I wish I had the courage to put people in their place whenever they say something ridiculous like that, but as confrontational as I can be when it comes to protecting  my friends & family, I often let it go when it comes to things that offend me personally.

I hope everything I've said makes sense, and if it makes one person think twice before making a throwaway comment that makes somebody feel 2 inches tall, than I'll be happy. Peace out, homies.

Hit me up on Twitter & Instagram (both are @katygilroyblog) and let me know your thoughts either on those or in the comments below!

Want to read about me being 100 days clean of self harm? 'course you do