Depression made me a great liar.

I am a great liar. I know, it's not a particularly endearing character trait, but I try to only whip it out for small scale jobs, like pretending to door-to-door salesmen that I'm only 17 or offering a detailed description of a nightmare train journey to my boss as the reason why I'm late, rather than saying that I couldn't get my eye-liner right.

I feel like I really honed my skill, really crafted it into something spectacular, when I was depressed. I told a lot of lies when I was depressed. I would have made a great protagonist in a lesson-teaching children's book. Apart from the whole feeling like I had nothing to live for thing. That probably wouldn't have been so great for the kids.

You tell a lot of lies when you're depressed. You sort of have to in order to try and maintain some pretence of being totally normal and just like any other 22 year old who is having the best time of their life, doing stuff that is totally random and going to club nights called Chirpse.

There's the biggie, obviously; the “I'm fine” lie, but this is almost always a bit of a lie for most of us anyway, isn't it? I'm talking about the kind of lies that, if they weren't being said, would've left room for me to tell someone, or at least to suggest, that things weren't going great in the ol' noggin.
Some of those lies were as follows-

Also, I'm playing pretty fast and loose with the tenses here. Stick with it.

“Yep, totally up for that. I'll be there.”
Yeah, I won't be there. In fact, as I'm saying “I'll be there”, I'm actually mentally drafting my apologetic, exclamation mark laden get-out text.
It's nothing personal. I want to be there, desperately; drinking warm, cheap white wine, doing that thing where you flip a beer mat off the side of the table and try to catch it, finding out who went back to a girl's house and pissed himself in her bed, all of that stuff.
However, I also can't think of anywhere I want to be less. I'm exhausted, despite sleeping or being horizontal whenever I'm not being paid to be sitting upright at work. I have fuck all to say. I've literally done nothing for the last two months. I'm not armed with hilarious anecdotes or amazing career news. Actually, if you ask me about my job then I will cry, because I am shit at it. Also, I feel like the most hideous person alive and the idea of people looking at me makes me feel sick.
I don't want to go because I feel so lonely and I feel so lonely because I don't want go to things like this. Depression is full of fun emotional palindromes like that.

“Sent out loads of CVs. I actually have a phone interview tomorrow.”
I eventually quit my job because I was depressed. It was a terrible job, for terrible people, so it was never going to make feel tippety-top, but combined with my own sense of inadequacy and incapability of doing anything well, it was a fucking nightmare.
I'd told myself that if I could find a way out of my job, then I would be myself again; the job was the problem, a bit like how when you eat something dodge you feel gross until you vom and then you feel fine. I needed to vom up my job.
I did vom and for about five days I felt better. I got  some sleep, I went shopping at two in the afternoon, I had a cream tea in a garden centre with my grandparents; it was nice. But then people (my mum) started asking what I was going to do next, job wise and I realised that I didn't really see much point in finding a career path that I could follow throughout my life, because I wasn't sure if I really wanted to be around for my life.
No one else needed to know that though (they did, they really did), so when quizzed by my mum when she returned from work to find me looking suspiciously unwashed, I would say “Yeah, I've sent out a few CV s, I've actually got a phone interview tomorrow.”
For about 3 months, I had a lot of phone interviews. Turns out, I'm shit at phone interviews.

“Just had a quiet one, really.”
Usually said in response to a co-worker asking me how my weekend was and not technically a lie, as such, more a deliberately misleading statement, perhaps?
A 'quiet weekend' usually implies things like watching The Graham Norton Show, sorting out your iTunes, drinking Rekorderlig, going to a Toby Carvery etc. It does not imply that I walked into my room on  Friday evening, stripped off and crawled into bed, only to drag myself out again at 9pm on Sunday when I would scurry to the bathroom and attempt to repair what wearing Friday's make up for 60 hours had done to my face.
My weekend was my bed. I actually got sore elbows from being in bed so much, how fucking awful is that?

I would be very careful not to move too much, in order to trick my flatmate into thinking that I left the flat really early and got back really late because I was out having the best time ever. I carefully timed my bathroom trips so that we didn't bump into each other in the hallway. This wasn't difficult, my bathroom trips were rare; I regularly used to give myself blinding dehydration headaches because I couldn't face leaving my room and I didn't think that 'myself' was worth getting a glass of water for.
My weekend was so quiet that I became painfully dehydrated.


I eventually reached my quota on lies. I officially ran out when I went to get my contraceptive pill prescription renewed and my GP asked if I was heading back to work after the appointment, a question to which I initially responded to by making the sound that a balloon makes when you scratch it.

So yes, depression made me a liar. It's also managed, somehow, to make me a bit more honest, I think.

I don't mean honest in a nice way, necessarily. I mean, if a cashier gives me too much change I still exit the shop quickly and don't look back. I also don't mean honest in “I just speak my mind and I don't give a shit” reality TV contestant way either. I don't always speak my mind and I do give a shit.

In fact, it's only really made me honest about depression.

Or at least want to be honest about it.

Depression is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but one thing it is not is stock photos of women wearing grey marl and looking tearful, whilst wiping their bright eyes and unblemished faces with a really pointy tissue.

Trust me.