I’ve had two year-long periods when I was so depressed, so much of the time that life became really hard. The most immediate unhappiness that I felt during those times was loneliness and isolation, because depression puts my barriers up and locks me in behind them.
A colleague from the HIV/AIDS project I worked on in Angola was insistent on the matter of auto-estigma, self-stigma. Don’t assume, she taught me, that just because a low-budget sex worker has HIV she disagrees with the normal attitudes about HIV. I wonder how she feels about herself?
I’ve had two year-long periods when I was so depressed, so much of the time that life became really hard. The most immediate unhappiness that I felt during those times was loneliness and isolation, because depression puts my barriers up and locks me in behind them.
