A Hop, Skip and Jump to the Depths of Hell.

It bothers me immensely that someone else summed up my experiences better than I could but I'm still glad I found this.

Hyperbole & A Half: Depression Part Two

I've lost a lot in the past year. Mainly due to moments like this:

"I could no longer rely on genuine emotion to generate facial expressions, and when you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.

It's weird for people who still have feelings to be around depressed people. They try to help you have feelings again so things can go back to normal, and it's frustrating for them when that doesn't happen. From their perspective, it seems like there has got to be some untapped source of happiness within you that you've simply lost track of, and if you could just see how beautiful things are... 

At first, I'd try to explain that it's not really negativity or sadness anymore, it's more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can't feel anything about anything — even the things you love, even fun things — and you're horribly bored and lonely, but since you've lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you're stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is. 

But people want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they'll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative; like maybe you WANT to be depressed. The positivity starts coming out in a spray — a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face. And it keeps going like that until you're having this weird argument where you're trying to convince the person that you are far too hopeless for hope just so they'll give up on their optimism crusade and let you go back to feeling bored and lonely by yourself."

Man. If only I'd been able to explain this to the people who were trying to help me. But I pushed them away because it felt to me like they were emphasising the fact that there was something wrong with me and that made me feel even worse. It seemed like there was no way to explain it to them.  In the end, all I could say to them was that I wanted a break from our friendship because it felt painful to be around them. I still can't explain why. 

It became apparent that they would never understand what I was going through though, so they started alienating me.  Like I deserved it or something. I don't believe that that is the best thing to do to someone who is going through this...but I guess they just didn't get it. I still feel like they don't care about me anymore, and wonder if they ever did. So I've probably lost those friends forever, which has only made things worse.

I suppose it's caused something of a massive wake up call though - it's gotten to the point where I know that things in my life need to change. My first step is to see my doctor and actually commit to taking medication this time. I can only hope that it helps as much as it did the first time round.

I am still terrified, though. I always live in fear that I'll be back in this place one day. It also gets harder and harder to fight back, the older you get. This is the longest period of time I've been this unhappy in many years, simply because I was angry - a bad thing happened to me and I knew I didn't deserve it - and I thought that I could fight it 100% on my own. It's taken me a year to realise that that is not working. A year of waking up every morning and wishing I didn't. A year of alienating myself from everyone around me. A year of pretending that I'm fine.  A year of hoping and praying that I wouldn't need to go back on medication in order to enjoy being alive. But I guess the truth is that I have a chemical imbalance in my brain that makes me this way and it's taken me this long to actually see it as that - an illness that needs to be treated. 

I have been angry and wallowing for too long. I know that life can be good again and now I only want to get back there. I hope I have a corn moment like Allie did.