Content warning for depression.
I'm coming out of a minor low, not enough to be called a depressive episode in my terms. Those happen around every few weeks for a few days. I'm lonely in and right after these times. My therapist encourages me not to make an identity out of mental illness, and I'm trying. I know my life is broader than this, and I'm fortunate to have a revolving wheel of interests and friends and activities. But it's lonely, to be sad and trying to push it away from myself. If I don't allow sadness to exist in my life, then there are huge swaths missing. This weekend would have been one of them.
Sadness changes when it becomes this deep and lasts this long. Reality distorts. My memory becomes clips of moments, severed from their contexts. In my dreams I go through a monotonous day, and I spend my waking hours dreaming. I stumble into a room: I wake to find myself sitting talking to a friend. I haven't eaten - the kitchen is hostile, there's dust in all the glasses, I can't can't can't stand up or I'll die. We've switched genres: we're in an experimental film and I sense an unhappy ending.
But the worst thing about these days isn't the distortion of reality. It's the distortion of myself. I think it could be bearable, if I could be a bemused protagonist navigating an upside down world. Instead, I don't recognize myself in my thoughts. Sadness has swallowed me up entirely. When I'm sad, I believe everyone hates me. I believe I'm a bad person. And I also know, in some other part of my mind, that these thoughts are bullshit and only surface when I'm not doing well. It's a tiring inner battle. My thoughts get loud. Good thoughts leak into bad, and I'm not sure which side is the sadness and which is me. What I want most is for it to stop.
It's a relief when I give in to these thoughts. Only then is there silence. I can stop thinking about myself. It is settled. My heart slows. I can sink into the (mis)conception that reclusion is the only path forward. I stop thinking of morality. I watch the world move around me, in real time now. I am tired of thinking of if I am Good or Bad, or if what I do is Good or Bad, or if this thought is Good or Bad, and I am tired of caring about Good and Bad. I am tired about caring about the most healthy thing and the best way forward. I am tired of trying to ignore this sadness and the death grip it has on my life. I am tired of stoicism. I am tired of healthy coping mechanisms. I am tired of wanting to be good. Let me be hated. Let me be bad. Let me let go.
I know that giving in isn't healthy, and that I need to resolutely oppose harmful thoughts, and then I should shut up about it and stop ruminating lest it become too big of a part of me. A consequence of the challenge-each-negative-thought approach is the implication that this crushing, self-esteem-twisting, reality-blurring, memory-destroying sadness is due to some failing on my part, which I could fix if I stumbled across the right solution. After 21 years, I should consider a possibility that there is no solution. That this is me. Only then, I think, can I truly try to disentangle sadness from Good and Bad.
I want to be happy. Self hatred feels juvenile. And it's okay, in some meaning of the word, because these phases don't last forever, and I've weathered them for 21 years now. I buckle in, give it my best fighting effort, try to contain any leaks of self-depreciation, try not to hate myself for the sadness and for fearing it so much. I want someone to tell me this isn't my fault.