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That's the "Golden Rule," and it goes at least as far back as Leviticus 19:18, long before Jesus.
The catch, of course, as many people have pointed out, is that we also have to love ourselves.
For "people like us," that's particularly hard.
It isn't just the illness itself; depression is so fundamentally tied up with self-esteem that ranges from the merely "low" to the abysmal that self-blame and self-loathing become routine. But even if we get a working medication solution, spend years in therapy and become more or less fully "functional," we look at ourselves, at our depression, as a flaw, a shortcoming or defect, even if it is no longer a disability.
Most of the times that I've seen this "love ourselves" concept addressed, it's unsatisfying; the focus in too many ways is on how loving ourselves is different from loving someone else. I've come to believe that it can't be all that different. The problem comes with how we understand love in the first place.
Some say, "Love is blind." I disagree, emphatically. Love is anything but blind. Infatuation, even lust - these can be blind, and often are, but no matter how often we, or our popular "culture," confuse these with love, there is a very wide chasm between them.
It took me more than 50 years of living to find, but I did,at last, find someone with whom I share true love, or at least the best approximation of true love, by far, that I've ever known. It isn't the least bit blind. I have my share of faults and weaknesses, as does she. Few, if any, of those are hidden from the other; she knows that I am sloppy, disorganized, too often lazy, etc. She sees my strengths as well, and I see both the desirable and less-than-desirable in her.
Yet if you asked either of us, "why do you love that one?" neither of us would give you a list; probably the most detail I would give you is that she makes me feel so very loved, and that she accepts me for who I am, as I am, she has never tried to change me.
It is that knowing acceptance, I think, that is the key to self-love. It is one of the things that therapy can help us achieve.
Having depression can be humbling, especially for those who, like me, go into deep crisis and find ourselves hospitalized, all the more so for those of us (again, like me) who are highly educated over-achievers, etc.
I could wish that I didn't have this illness. But wishing would not change anything, except drain me of emotional energy with nothing (at best) in return.
I have accepted my illness as part of who I am. I have come to an understanding that, whatever purpose there may be for my existence, in any larger scheme of things, in the essence of my relation to the Source of my being, depression is as much a part of this as my gender, my intelligence (or lack of the same), etc. I know, now, that there are insights that I could have gotten no other way, that there is a dimension to whatever compassion I have for others that is bound up in my own experience of mental illness.
Depression may be seen as an imperfection. Yet nobody, even without mental illness, is perfect, and it is our imperfections that shape our unique humanity, both individually and collectively.
It has not come overnight, nor easily, and I suspect the process is not yet complete. But I am as certain as I can honestly claim to be, that I have come to accept my depression as part of myself, to be understood and dealt with, for sure, but not to be rejected or denied, nor seen as something entirely negative. There are ways in which my life is far richer, for what this illness has put me through, and I would not trade those back for a "cure."
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