Don't let the bastards grind you down. People who have never dealt with this **** don't know what it's like. The worthlessness, the hopelessness, the suicidal thoughts. The almost unbearable pain of existence and the desire to escape it. The self-destructiveness. They don't get it because they've had comparatively easy lives.

The only kernel of truth in what they say is that you can get out of it if you keep plugging and find the answers you need. I personally had an epiphany yesterday where I finally understood how critical self-love is. Not in some hippie-dippy, airy-fairy sense; but in the sense that if you don't love yourself, the evil part of your nature as a human will do its best to torture, punish, and ultimately destroy you.

I still don't know how to love myself in a practical sense, but I do know I need to figure it out and will be working intensively on it in therapy. I don't know if that's the answer you need, but I think self-love is a prerequisite to achieving many of the other qualities that depression steals from you: confidence, energy, sociability, self-esteem, and so forth.

And the alternative, self-hatred, ensures that you will remain stuck where you are.