More Meanderings

[dreamcatchings]

I hate commercials for anti-depressants because they typically read like a snapshot of my life.

Lack of energy? Check
Loss of interest in activities you used to enjoy? Check
Feelings of apathy and disinterest? Check
Having to "wind yourself up" throughout the day to perform simple tasks? Check
Not wanting to go anywhere or see anyone? Check
Feelings of sadness? Check

I'm trying to be more proactive, but I don't want to talk about them because that almost always seems to make things backfire on me. I have not yet called any doctors or made any appointments, which is likely due not only to the depression and my total avoidance of doctors but also because of the weather. I hate winter weather. I do not want to drive in ice or snow or any sort of "wintry mix." It's really hard to make myself do anything when it's cold. It's hard to care that I'm not doing anything.

Sometimes I wonder if I feel like other people feel. Most of the time, I don't actually seem to feel anything. I'm not happy or sad or excited or anxious. I'm just there. It doesn't seem like contentment or apathy. It feels like empty, hollow, autopilot. I don't know if that's normal. I don't even know how to broach that sort of topic to ask someone. I could. I have friends I could ask. I have multiple friends I could ask, and I can already gauge in my head how they would react. Not what they would say but what their faces would look like.

One of the things that kills me, one of the things that can make the carefully held together broken pieces fall all over the place is compassion. I don't understand it. It makes no sense. Show me an inch of kindness, give me the sort of hurt and astonished look that tells me how deeply you care, ask me what's wrong, give me the time of day and I fall apart. I can't help it. It's a trigger. I have stopped communicating by and large. I talk, I sass, I quip and jest. I make astute comments. I come up with intellectual ideas. I offer up very little of myself.

Until someone who knows me stops me and looks at me just so. And then my world is open.

It's scary and disarming.

I don't understand. I don't know if it's me that doesn't work right or if everyone feels this way and they're all just better at hiding it than I am.

Comments

[believeitup.livejournal.com]

Apart from the wintry mix, I'm there. I spent so much of the time leading up to Christmas, six weeks or so, crying in the offices of various bosses because they would do just what you described. They'd ask and I'd know they meant it and I'd fall apart.

So, I do feel the same. Some days I hide it well, I think, and some days I don't. I don't know what's better, though.

[magikfanfic.livejournal.com]

It's actually reassuring to have someone say that the same thing happens to them. I spend a lot of time wondering whether my brain is completely wired wrong. I worry that I don't process things the way I'm supposed to.

There have been some days at work when someone will give me that look and start to ask and I'll have to ask them to stop because I can't. I do my level best not to cry at work.

[believeitup.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of people have it happen and they just don't know how to articulate it. For me, it was shocking to read your post because you nailed how I feel so exactly.

That's why it was mostly in offices. That was a pretty humiliating span of time, though, not gonna lie.

[magikfanfic.livejournal.com]

I hate that you feel the same because I don't want other people to feel like this, but I'm glad that I was able to put it into discernible words that make sense. I fear so often that I'm not saying what I'm trying to say.

[believeitup.livejournal.com]

Well, it's all right lately. It comes and goes. Around/leading up to Christmas was a bad time. Since the middle of January or so, I've been getting better. I find myself laughing and smiling for no reason, the way I used to when my antidepressants worked their best. So that's something.

I think you put it very, very clearly :)

[mizzmarvel.livejournal.com]

Depression makes no kind of sense whatsoever.

[magikfanfic.livejournal.com]

That is so true and upsets me at the same time. Too much of my brain works on logic to just accept that I can't fix this puzzle.

[chickwithmonkey.livejournal.com]

You have to remember that the depression is a separate thing in your brain, apart from you, and not actually you. This is hard. It's easy for me to think that I am a bad, messed-up person who is just deficient and has feelings that are totally wrong and I should just be able to make myself normal, but that's such a huge lie. Your personality and your self are good and complex and real. Your depression is something else in your head making you think bad things. It just basically sucks that it happened to show up for you, but it wasn't because you did something wrong.

This is not me being compassionate - you know I am not a patient or loving person at all. I just hate depression. The Buddhist Box would say that hate is bad, but when it's a choice between feeling nothing and feeling hate that I can't feel anything else, I'll take the hate.

[magikfanfic.livejournal.com]

If I'm being honest, I would say that I've been suffering from various levels of depression for a lot longer than I've actually let on. It started around high school or a little bit before, I would imagine. One of my main problems is that, for a very long time, I have mirrored other people. I would lose myself in people.

When it started, it wasn't my friends at school. Not proper school anyway. It was the friends at writing school. They held me together. I could make it through because I knew that summers meant them and special occasions meant them. I could get through the rest of it because they were waiting at the end.

I also lost myself in writing. There are vast tracks of my writing out there and saved to various disks that are as dark and broken as broken can be. It was a way to release poison. Release it through writing and then soothe the injury with people to carry me. I am a co-dependent, passive aggressive asshole. It was just the way I learned to cope in a family where no one said anything. Where my mother openly chided my sister for daring to go on anti-depressants so she would feel better. Because tears and asking for help and admitting defeat make you weak and bad. I'm not blaming my mother. Her parents were just as quiet. That Irish/Scottish backbone of pride and just pushing through because no one is going to fucking help you if you don't do it yourself. And the Catholic guilt that I almost think was passed done in my blood because we didn't go to church. So it's either my blood or the collective unconsciousness bleeding through me.

And in college I had so many people. I had you and Jen and Corey and De and Bjorn and Dawn and Heather and Brandon and Chris. I had scads of people. I had professors who believed in me and made me feel special.

Then everything fell the fuck apart. I don't mirror people because I can't bring myself to trust that much anymore. There's about one person, and we play a constant game of one step forward and two steps back because he is almost as untrusting as I am.

Wow. This got long.

Anyway. I had meant to just say that, yeah, I get what you're saying. And logical me who searches through all this emotion looking for sense gets it. And emotional me who sees these words and feels wants to cry. And you remind me of the lyrics of Dar Williams' song "It's a War in There," which is so beyond true.