what depression feels like

I'm starting to feel better, and in the past few years, I've never felt better this quickly with my bouts of depression. They usually end up lasting several weeks until I up my Effexor dose. However, I don't want to stop journaling these thoughts. I want to force myself to think about them and try to address and resolve them. When I get depressed, I OBSESS on these. I cannot think about ANYTHING ELSE but my father, and how sheltered and imprisoned and repressed I felt in Roswell. The first few times it happened, I didn't realize that it was a sickness, and that it was clinically depression. During one episode in 2000, a close college friend who is now a psychiatrist told me that one of the symptoms of depression is this ruminating. I try to get my mind off it by keeping busy, but it just doesn't work. I've told [Husband] that it's like my brain is just BOMBARDING me with negative thoughts, and bringing up the past, and doing something to tell me that I'm a worthless piece of shit. It's not like schizophrenia, with a third-party voice in my head, but rather loss of control of my own mind, in which I cannot get my brain, no matter how hard I try, to think of anything else. I told a friend last year that when I lose control like this, I try to believe people who tell me that I'm not a loser, but I just can't. Like if someone told me that the house was on fire, and I couldn't see it or smell it, I'd have to believe that person because they're sane and can see it and I can't, and I'd get out of the house. But I would still not see the fire. Poor analogy, because it's really hard to explain, but no matter how many sane people tell me that my father is the weirdo, not me, I cannot accept it. I just try to believe that it is actually OK to be here, and it is OK for me to drive a car, and it is OK for me to have friends, so I do those things, but it's very surreal, and no matter how hard I try, I can't actually believe it.