One of the depression symptoms that really stood out for me was a
feeling of heaviness in my body. I would sit down to watching youtube, which
was something that had always given me a lot of joy, and it felt like I
had weights attached to my body and mind, making a previously enjoyable activity
feel like it was just too much effort.
There may come a time, in the near future, when you begin to fear that you have accidentally wasted your entire 20s.The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so
the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief. I had
always wanted to not give a fuck about anything. I viewed feelings as a
weakness — annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over
myself. And I finally didn't have to feel them anymore.
But my experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became
obvious that there's a huge difference between not giving a fuck and
not being able to give a fuck. Cognitively, you might know that different things are happening to you, but they don't feel very different.Which leads to horrible, soul-decaying boredom.I tried to get out more, but most fun activities just left me
existentially confused or frustrated with my inability to enjoy them. I was still sort of uncomfortable about how bored and detached I felt
around other people, and I was still holding out hope that the whole
thing would spontaneously work itself out. As long as I could manage to
not alienate anyone, everything might be okay!
However, 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. And that's the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn't always
something you can fight back against with hope. It isn't even something —
it's nothing. And you can't combat nothing. You can't fill it up. You
can't cover it. It's just there, pulling the meaning out of everything.
That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to
sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.
It would be like having a bunch of dead fish, but no one around you will
acknowledge that the fish are dead. Instead, they offer to help you
look for the fish or try to help you figure out why they disappeared. The problem might not even have a solution. But you aren't
necessarily looking for solutions. You're maybe just looking for someone
to say "sorry about how dead your fish are" or "wow, those are super
dead. I still like you, though."
I started spending more time alone.
Perhaps it was because I lacked the emotional depth necessary to panic,
or maybe my predicament didn't feel dramatic enough to make me
suspicious, but I somehow managed to convince myself that everything was
still under my control right up until I noticed myself wishing that
nothing loved me so I wouldn't feel obligated to keep existing. It's a strange moment when you realize that you don't want to be alive
anymore. If I had feelings, I'm sure I would have felt surprised. I
have spent the vast majority of my life actively attempting to survive.
Ever since my most distant single-celled ancestor squiggled into
existence, there has been an unbroken chain of things that wanted to
stick around. Yet there I was, casually wishing that I could stop existing in the same
way you'd want to leave an empty room or mute an unbearably repetitive
noise.When I say that deciding to not kill myself was the worst part, I should
clarify that I don't mean it in a retrospective sense. From where I am
now, it seems like a solid enough decision. But at the time, it felt
like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless
wasteland, and — far in the distance — I had seen the promising glimmer
of a slightly less miserable wasteland. And for just a moment, I thought
maybe I'd be able to stop and rest. But as soon as I arrived at the
border of the less miserable wasteland, I found out that I'd have to
turn around and walk back the other way.
And every direction was bullshit for a really long time,
especially up. The absurdity of working so hard to continue doing
something you don't like can be overwhelming. And the longer it takes
to feel different, the more it starts to seem like everything might
actually be hopeless bullshit.
My feelings did start to return eventually. But not all of them came back, and they didn't arrive symmetrically.
I had not been able to care for a very long time, and when I finally
started being able to care about things again, I HATED them. But hatred
is technically a feeling, and my brain latched onto it like a child
learning a new word.
