depression is not normal

I think some people think that being depressed is just a normal part of life. When I have told people I am depressed most of them say oh but why...you have such a wonderful family, healthy kids blah blah blah...well DUHHHHHHHHH.....it is because I have an illness called depression. If my kids were sick or my husband was dead and I was depressed, that would be NORMAL....when your life is going well and your kids are healthy and you have food and a house and you still feel depressed, that is ABNORMAL, you have an illness. By telling me that I should feel blessed and should be happy becase look at this person or that person who has all these bad things going on and I am soo lucky and I should be happy...HELLOOOO that is like telling a person with a broken leg that they should get up and walk...I have an illness. I know I am lucky, I know I am blessed, yet I still feel like life sucks...and of course I feel guilty when people point out how blessed I should feel.
I think people are confused in the fact that mental illness is still an illness, a sickness, a disease. It is nothing we have done wrong. People would never tell somebody with cancer to just get over it, but people have the nerve to say that to people with depression.
Luckily I have simple depression, not bipolar. My depression seems to come and go with really no rhyme or reason. Often my depression is not in a form that people would even realize that anything was wrong, unless it was somebody who knew me really well. I do not cry or seem sad, I do not think of suicide. I usually just do not care about anything. I do not care about how I look, if I change my clothes, I do not care or even know what day or the week it is. I could spend the entire day sleeping. The days that I am depressed I also seem to not want to eat. I just do not want to bother to take the time to make anything and no food sounds good. Too bad I have not lost any weight. I have actually gained lots from the medications I am on.
I was thinking some more the other day about what sort of symptoms I had of anxiety when I was a kid, and the more I thought of it the more I realized that I was a really depressed kid. I hid it well but I did have symptoms of it that I can even remember now. I also wrote this awful awful dark poems. Poems about me living in a box, or dying and bleeding and nobody caring. Poems about me being worthless and unloved. I saved the poems in a notebook and was reading some of them the other day. I can not believe that people who read them when I was younger never looked into me being depressed. In 9th grade I took a creative writing class and lots of these poems are from my class journal and was read and graded by the teacher. Even though here was mentions of harming my self and lots of saddness in the poems, she never questioned me, never sent me to see the school counselor, never contacted my parents etc. I also used to have quite a few of the poems hanging on a corkboard in my room....again, nobody ever asked me if I was depressed.
I also had odd sicknesses, injuries, bruises etc that I had caused myself. Looking back, this started about ag 13 and lasted until my early 20's....I will write a post later detailing some of the things I did to punish myself or to get attention, I think mostly to get attention...