Do you think I’m crazy?
Because my therapist does.
I’d like to preface this with a quick thank you, to the internet. Specifically weird facebook, specifically aesthetes. Thanks for giving me space to completely ignore my own shitty shitty thoughts and delve into a more reformed sense of self-deprecation and great humor. Thank you, mr. skeletal
I’d also like to say that it is close to a miracle that i am still here, and alive. If you told me when i was 12 that i would actually make it to see 20, it wouldn’t have made sense.
Depression creeps. It creeps up on you like lights dimming in a theater. Your eyesight gets fuzzy and your breathing slows down and you let your mind set into a new reality. Depressed is a word I learned early but never actually used, because from what i understood about the word, if you are depressed, you need help.
Help isn’t a hug or a smile or someone who wants whats best for you: help is a waiting room with no one in it. Help is a 3 page consent form and no family vacations because you have to pay for therapy. I never ask for help anymore.
Moreso depression is the feeling that help cannot come, it is not available to you and it never will be. it is hopelessness, helplessness, loneliness incarnate. I am in love but I am lonely. There are places to go for help — but I can’t.
Can’t. Can’t means a lot more when you talk about yourself. It’s a reflection of what you think you ought to be doing, and how much you believe in yourself. If someone says that you are qualified and you say you can’t, the idea is that you are being modest, because you can! you, are qualified, able. Can’t is a failsafe. Can’t will get you nowhere. Cannot’s have not gotten many people anything they deserve in life. However with depression, it seems like you can’t be deserving of anything.
I constantly find myself apologizing.
One time I apologized to a woman, for opening my backpack and getting my notebook out, though it had nothing to do with her and she wasn’t in the way at all but i felt compelled to admit that i’d been so foolish and stupid and dumb, moronic and unfit for society because my notebook was in my bag, not my hands. She laughed at me and told me not to apologize, so i apologized again, cursing myself for being so stupid as to apologize to someone who clearly didn’t care. Apologizing for existing, in my experience, is the most intense rejection of self.
It’s hard to do things for yourself when you’re feeling undeserving. Bathing, brushing your hair and putting on a full outfit. Making breakfast, lunch or dinner. Making a Healthy breakfast, lunch or dinner. Making plans. Going to the grocery store. Going to the pharmacy, going to your friends, going to the kitchen, going to the mailbox. getting out of bed, cleaning your room, smiling, hobbies, calling your parents. Every little thing feels like a to-do list written in the worst handwriting imaginable. By even trying to get started, sometimes, it becomes too much to bear. and we break, and we curl back up in the blankets, and promise to try again tomorrow.
If i could explain anxiety, I probably wouldn’t have a headache right now. I wouldn’t be afraid to go outside if anxiety had a cause/effect kind of spiel, but instead anxiety is best defined as Jean-Paul Satre’s hell: a feeling you cannot escape. Anxiety is getting off the bus one stop early because you don’t want to miss your stop and you’re not confident enough that when you press the button, it will work. Anxiety is spending 2 hours getting ready for a party and spending more time trying to convince your friends to leave than actually enjoying yourself. Anxiety, goddammit its that feeling you get when you don’t know whether you completely aced that math test or if you got every question wrong and it keeps you up for three days only to go into class and find out that on the way to work, your professor had her window open and all of the papers flew out, so you have to take a make-up test that day. It’s wasted energy because your body can’t think straight.
Somedays i can’t leave the house. Makes it hard to have a job and class and friends when that happens. It’s never as bad as I expect, but expectations are our own form of realities, so when I make it back after my scrimmages I find myself, exhausted.
Why did I do that
Why did I do that
Why did I do that
Why did I do that
Why
Did I
Do that
(why did I do that?)
Every scenario you wonder why it went wrong, every scenario it is your fault why it went wrong. It’s schrodinger’s predicament, as it may or may not have happened in the way you believe it did, but you will never really know what happened until you peel back the lid that you’ve closed tight on yet another experience that haunts you, like if you forgot the name of the person’s birthday party you were at, or rather, you weren’t sure of you’d forgotten it, so you tried so hard to avoid using any name to refer to them all night that you ended up hiding behind the snack bowl, hoping to listen in on a conversation that would open your mind up to the realization that you were right about this person’s name the whole time.
Every layer you reveal is another one of your close friends, verbally giving you a pat on the back “don’t worry about it, it’s really fine.” If I had a genie, if genies exist, someone should ask for a redefinition of the word “fine”
Is it fine that I spilled some water on my lap at dinner? Or is it fine if I knocked the whole pitcher over. Is it ok? Or is it just “fine”? With the redefinition of fine I believe I’ll find myself at ease a lot more, but then everything will not be fine.
I started to carry around reminders about how insignificant some problems are, however the panic sets in before I can get my shaky little fingers around the crumpled up fortune in my pocket.
At the end of it all, im grateful for a mind able to dissect my own faults and frenzies, grateful that I am not debilitated by such fears and feelings.
At the end of it all I still breathe and walk around, I brushed my teeth today and even though at the end of the day I don’t think anyone really gets what I’m saying,
At the end of it all, it will be ok.
