The Reality of Depression

I’ve tried writing this many times before, but it never exactly felt right. The words didn’t flow right on the page, or I felt like I wasn’t properly conveying the message that I wanted to convey. So here’s attempt number nine of trying to write this op-ed. I have severe depression. Or at least, I think I do. The only thing I have ever been diagnosed with, mental health wise, is depression. I don’t officially have a bipolar diagnosis, I don’t officially have a borderline personality disorder; I haven’t been diagnosed with either of these things despite them likely being other mental health issues I likely have. I don’t even know the clinical severity of my own depression, which is going on in my own head. And I have no motivation to actually want to seek out treatment, despite being aware that I likely need treatment for all of these things.

That’s the thing about depression. It drains you. It pulls every drop of motivation from you on a bad day and still depletes most of your motivation and drive on a good day. There have been days I called in to work saying, “Hey, I can’t come in” and making up some physical excuse like a migraine or vomiting because I didn’t want to admit that my mental illness has left me physical and mentally drained enough to not be able to work. To be sick at the idea of actually having to leave my apartment or even, some days, my bed. In my days off, I should be getting laundry done, or cleaning up the apartment I share with my roommate, but unless it’s a very good day, I barely even feel motivated enough to prepare myself something to eat.

My personal hygiene has definitely fallen due to lack of motivation. I can recall periods of time where I couldn’t even get out of bed to take medicine I needed, putting it off until the alarms every nine minutes got annoying to me or until I actually ventured out to prepare myself a bagel or a bowl of cereal. I find it hard to actually pull myself into the bathroom to brush my teeth or shave my face or take a shower. Every time I’m in there, I know I should, but I literally can’t bring myself to do any of it unless it’s a very good day for me. On a very bad day, it’s likely I won’t even leave my bed to use the bathroom until the point where I am physically ill.

Writing, reading, playing video games or listening to music, even that’s too draining for me sometimes, and these are things that I love to do. I love to sit at my computer and just write and write and not stop until I’ve expressed myself dry, but I don’t have any ideas anymore. I was working on a short story, but I have completely lost all motivation to attempt to finish it. Whenever I open up Word, I see its file name slowly falling down the list of recent files, dropping below draft after draft of articles about politics, depression, gender identity, sexuality, so many topics that I want to write about, that never get revised. They never get published. They aren’t good enough to be seen. So in time, they get deleted and forgotten. I have notes from album reviews that I never got around to doing despite wanting to. They never felt good enough, so I scrapped all of them.

I’d love to play all the games I have installed on my computer, but I just sit there. Staring at the game’s opening screen. Sometimes, I’ll venture past it and maybe play the game for ten to fifteen minutes, but it’s rarely more than that, even with games I adore. I know it would make me feel better and help me escape, but I can’t bring myself to boot up the games half the time, and when I do, I often just close them and don’t open them again until I feel like I need to because they have just been sitting there this whole time and I spent money on them.

My relationships with my friends and family has gone down the pits due to lack of motivation. I rarely ever talk to people even if I really enjoy their company. There is only one person that I talk to consistently on a willing basis and that is my significant other, Alex. I just don’t have the motivation to talk to anyone else. I feel like I’m just wasting their time and that they don’t want to hear from me. If they did, they’d initiate the conversation. And even then, I cut people out of my life because I will just naturally be very on and off with family and friends. One day, they could be the closest person in the world to me, and the next, I could hate everything they do and never want to talk to them again. And when you combine that with not talking to someone until they talk to you, and you have a brew for a lot of friendships and relationships that just end abruptly.

And my job. I know I complain about my job a lot to my significant other, but I do like my job. It may not be the best paying job in the world and I may not work many hours, but it’s a good job that isn’t seasonal, and can allow for serious opportunities if I stick with it. But I go back and forth between loving it dearly, thinking it’s a great job for me and even possibly a future career path, to hating it with every fiber of my being, wishing I never had to go back to work because I never want to see that place again. And it’s damaging to me. I have no motivation to actually want to go to work most of the time. I actively dread the days where I have to get up and know that I work that day. I hate getting up and remembering, “Hey, you have to leave your safe space with your comforts and leave them for seven to ten hours with the only comfort you typically can take with you, you can’t talk to for a good portion of that time.”

And why am I telling you all of this? I don’t know honestly. I don’t want a pity party. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me or feel bad for me. I just want to feel human. I want to feel like I have people who understand what’s going on in my head. I don’t want to alienate people from me anymore because I just don’t have the motivation to talk to them. I don’t want my friends to leave me because they feel like I don’t care about them, because I do. I don’t want to feel useless. I want to have good days, I want to be able to actually make food for myself and keep up with my proper hygiene. I just want to be able to function and right now, I can’t say that I am.