I wish I knew what to say, I can relate to so much of what you said. On top of depression itself being draining and exhausting, the medication trials and the therapy can be draining too. People with depression, real clinical depression, suffer a lot. Like I said... I really wish I had meaningful advice for you. But I struggle with the same things you do, and it is meaningful to me to talk to people who share those struggles. I don't think of myself as depressed anymore. I see my life as my real life - every day my eyes are opening more and I see ahead of me and behind me and cycles of life all around me. My spiritual crisis over suicide, which I longed for, came to a head. I decided that I can't commit suicide because it is %100 bad for everyone involved. It's just not a solution, because I believe that there is an afterlife and an act that caused such devastation to the people around me would distance me from God, and I want to be with God when I die. <Please feel free to skip the God stuff, if you don't believe - this is just me>. Another realization that caused a shift in thinking for me was that life is suffering - as in there is truly no escape from suffering. We have the choice to suffer in ways that bring us toward peace like resisting destructive behavior, or to suffer from the consequences of destructive behavior which is just added to the suffering you were originally trying to escape. So, this is me/depression now. I decided that I'm not meant to be happy or comfortable; I'm meant to take my losses and my pain and my limitations and accept them as reality. I am not okay with "moving on" or "thinking positive" or any other crap like that. That's not how I am. I've suffered so deeply from what I have lost and the pain I've endured that I don't see meaning in trying to pretend it's not there or that it's temporary. Because that's what you have to do to "move on" as people tell you, right? In my opinion, they are wrong. I do not hold anger against them for it because most people do not understand how deeply some people suffer. There is no fix for what has happened to me. So I choose to use the idea of suicide as a compass; when I get to that point, I remember that I am meant to keep suffering because the other option is too great a devastation to inflict upon others, and whatever I am in the afterlife.

Wow... I guess I needed to vent too.