My mood took its inevitable dip a day or two ago, triggered by an attack of acid reflux (or some other thing that causes diaphragm pain and back spasms) causing me to have to lie on the floor for a few hours attempting to relax my chest and back muscles.

Physical pain seems to bring with it self loathing and shame, I’m not sure why, I wonder if there is a somewhat universal evolutionary reason. Isolating ourselves in order to limit the spread of disease, maybe. But a sense of being rendered physically helpless too.
It was also just the destination my mood was always going to take after a few days bordering on elation as I had received a diagnosis of adult ADHD — a few days of feeling whole, a sense of having completed the puzzle, a few days of feeling like I finally understood, and the realisation that maybe I’d got a few things backwards.
I don’t struggle with social interaction and executive function because I’m anxious, I am anxious because I struggle with social interaction and executive function.
That could be a pretty significant turnaround. In always trying to get out of ‘this bad patch’ of anxiety and towards a place where I can function ‘normally’, I’d missed the fact that perhaps I’d never functioned normally to begin with. I’m trying to get back to a ‘normal’ that never was.
These feelings of epiphany and synthesis and growth and bliss never last, and I feel like an idiot every time they don’t. I shouldn’t, though. I am trying to see that feeling low does not change who I am. I am still the same person who gets excited and full of ideas and love. This is not a failure.
I do see that although I was feeling happy after I got my validation, I still had this sense of needing, of yearning, of seeking something out from others, and some paranoia about what people might be saying about me and my newfound answers. I’ve been in a non-stop social media notification loop. Check instagram, check facebook, check facebook again, check instagram, check mastodon, start again. Post a selfie. Like me, like me, see me, make me whole.
Whatever it is I’m seeking out, I never quite get enough of it, I ride a wave of almost getting it, almost getting enough. Happiness, for me, in this moment, seems to be defined as the state of working towards a goal, and feeling that it’s possible to attain that goal. Depression is knowing that you can’t. A subsequent shutdown into learned helplessness. No point trying. Energy conservation.
I feel ridiculous for thinking I could be happy; my depressive self says that people’s happiness level is genetically predetermined. Every time I feel good some part of me believes that this time it will be forever, I’ll be fixed, I’ll be functional. I wonder if my brain is just wired to burn through all its happy hormones right away, and can’t ever maintain feeling good.
I keep asking myself if I really do have ADHD, if the psychiatrist just told me what I wanted to hear, if I just told him what I wanted him to hear.
I’ve been told that stimulant medication could change my life. Maybe it can, maybe this yearning will lessen and I won’t have to desperately struggle to get enough approval, enough love, enough satisfaction, enough dopamine that I won’t keep tumbling into depression when I can’t fill the hole. And this is such an enticing idea. It’s the idea I want to believe in. The more I learn about life, though, the more I understand that just isn’t how things work. I can’t transform into a happy, energetic, perfect example of human achievement and interact with and perform perfectly in society. The system lies, the system is imperfect. I need to stop chasing perfection, and weather the lows wisely.

I did go skating, went for a walk, lifted some weights. I’m doing the things I’m supposed to do, and I feel a little better. I’m writing a blog post, just the same as when I feel other emotions.
I wonder if I can observe this sense of learned helplessness as a predictable result of frustrated yearning and understand that it’s not my fault, it won’t last forever, I don’t need to let it crush everything. I just get sad a lot, and maybe I need to let my life settle around that immutable fact instead of always hoping that this time, this time I will be okay for good.
But maybe I shouldn’t accept helplessness and hopelessness without a fight, either.
