I'm in my 40s now and I've lived with diagnosed, clinical depression all my life. In my 20s I was self-medicating myself liberally with alcohol, anxiolytes (mainly benzodiazepines) and occasional weed smoking. My depression and alcoholism got progressively worse and eventually my condition deteriorated into psychotic depression. I was hospitalized for some time.

My experiences from both depression and alcoholism is that they are a lot alike: there is no cure and the dark abyss of sickness is always there waiting for you to fall in.

You'll never be happy-go-lucky type of a personality, but that's OK. You are what you are. You may be dark, brooding and pessimistic, but that's your outlook on life and the society has no right to expect you to cheer up and take the "normal" maddeningly cheerful and disgustingly positive view on life. You should completely disregard the ignorant people who say that "oh, everybody gets the blues now and then" and then tell you to cheer up. They don't know shit about what real depression is like. The monster we have to live with has its fangs and nails embedded so deep in our brain tissue that telling us to cheer up is just as ridiculous as telling a cancer patient to cure himself. At the best depression compares to chronic physical pain, at the worst it is a debilitating and lethal condition.

However, when your life gets disrupted/disabled because of the depression, there are things you can and should do to make the life more bearable. You can't exorcise the monster completely, but you can learn to live with it.

It all starts from this question: do you want to be alive?

When I hit the bottom I had a revelation: I can keep on drinking, popping benzos the doctors kindly keep prescribing to me and wallowing in my despair, but it will kill me before I'm 40. I seriously considered that option as, to be honest, I didn't want to live that much. However, I didn't want to die either, because that would mean that the life and the universe had won by managing to crush me. So, in therapy I decided that I'll live - just to give the finger to life, the universe and the sadistic god who allegedly gave me this life devoid of any meaning. Go ahead, do you worst. I'll bend, but I will not break and give you the satisfaction.

That was my motivation, you've got to find yours.

The next step is to find something to do with all the empty hours. Initially, I spent quite a lot of time in therapy trying to find alternatives to drinking. Eventually I found another drug to replace the alcohol, sedatives and weed.

For me it was regimented exercise: bicycling, boxing and weight workouts. I enjoy reading, making plans and charting my progress in detail, so I read a lot of human physiology, anatomy, nutritional science and theory of sports, and turned my exercises into science.

Even if you don't drink or do recreational drugs, I think finding such a hobby or hobbies should help you cope with depression. I'm not saying that you should start exercising religiously, but try experimenting with different activities and see if you like any of them. If you don't like it, stop doing it and find something else. Experiment! Don't just think of a hobby and how (un)interesting it sounds. With a depression-prone personality, you'll just end up discarding all ideas before you even try them.

Heck, become a prepper and start making plans for the doomsday. I didn't believe in Y2K, but I did do prepping, because reading on survival techniques, creating a bug-out kit and planning for all kids of contingencies was simply fun!

If your depression is so bad that you can't think straight, get help. For me, the warning signs were unpaid bills (didn't care anymore), loss of all social life and spending all day in bed drunk/asleep. I know I'm going to get bashed for this, but my experience is that SSRI drugs (prozac-type medication) do help. They dull the sharpest mental pain and thus help you to gain back control over your life. You SHOULD NOT, however, settle just for the pills and keep popping them for the rest of your life. That's an easy solution for the doctors and they like to prescribe SSRI pills liberally just to get rid of you. The medication should ALWAYS be accompanied by therapy or at least peer support (someone who's been through the same experience) or maybe a family member or a friend who can truly relate to you. I don't recommend the last one, since helping someone deal with moderate/severe depression is extremely draining, especially if you're not suffering from the same condition.

I did SSRI drugs and Naltrexone (for controlling my alcoholism) for two years, but I haven't been taking them ever since. These pills did help by dulling the sharpest pain of depression and curbing my craving for alcohol, but cognitive therapy was the most effective ingredient in my recovery. Cognitive therapy is about helping you to spot harmful and disproportional thought patterns and how to correct them. It's rather fast and practical, and does not involve any of the stereotypical Freudian psychoanalysis of your earliest childhood memories, sexual dysfunction or mother-father grudges.

One more thing. You say that you try to tell yourself that tomorrow is going to be better. Don't waste your time on thinking about tomorrow - or the past, for that matter. This moment is what matters. Dwelling on the past or the future will just depress you more.