Depression

I have been miserable for months and all my thoughts on here are of my life falling apart on purpose lol. at least my ether color is cool.

you've dealt with severe mental illness most of your life. you're waiting for it to kill you. but it won't, unless you let it. question is, would it be better to simply let it?

The rabid, sad old beast has grabbed my throat again. I didn't know that my annoyance and intolerance for other's personalities was part of depression; I just thought I was turning into an asshole. I wish I had enough energy to do things, to get out of my own way. We'll see how the good old fluoxetine pans out this time. I was afraid of drugs for years, but that was a spiritual problem. Now that I've settled into a strong, solid atheism I can view the brain as slightly broken instead of spiritually deficient.

I feel like depression makes me a bad person, and this is part of why it's so god damn hard to get over: once I start to crash, once I start falling into patterns of self-indulgent, self-absorbed behavior, unable to function socially, worrying my friends, snapping at people, walking out of conversations, making everyone in the house uncomfortable by sleeping eighteen hours a day or not eating... then the guilt comes, and with the guilt, a deeper depression, until I'm just sitting, staring, feeling completely unloveable, and, of course, creeping the hell out of everyone else by just sitting and staring like a zombie, minus the brain-eating.

I hate being selfish, and I hate bothering other people, but depression is such a difficult thing to hide. Sometimes you can fake being cheerful but you can't fake being a witty or creative conversationalist if your mind is too full of feeling generally devastated over nothing in particular to allow you enough focus to even follow a conversation, let alone participate in it. You can't hide plain old not talking to people for days. In a communal living situation, like my dorm, it's also pretty damn difficult to hide excessive sleeping or failing to eat. But I don't have the energy to stop indulging these behaviors.

And I'm lucky that I have people who actually care, but I feel so bad making them put up with me when I'm like this. I freeze every time someone asks me "Are you alright?" because I don't want to lie, but I certainly don't want to burden them with all the ways I'm not alright, because nobody really wants to hear that good Lord, I feel awful.

And that's just the established friends. What tends to make me feel worse is the people awkwardly in the middle, that I'm not really close enough to feel that I can count on them to be there for me or that I should be able to, at least not yet, but who end up wandering into the path of my sudden lapses in human functioning anyway: the girl who caught me sticking pins into myself in the locker room in high school, the teacher I had a breakdown in front of when I didn't complete an assignment because I'd slept from the moment I'd gotten home the previous day to the very last moment I could roll out of bed to get to school that morning. Or, this particular time around, the boy I'd been talking to all summer, being silly, being random, being drunk, flirting outrageously, slowly getting to know each other... but hardly a solid enough situation to sustain my nerves when this wave of depression began threatening. I like him far too much to just have given up when keeping the depression at bay enough to keep acting like a human being became a full-time occupation, but he doesn't know me well enough to put up with the bizarre behavioral changes, the sudden inability to talk to him normally, born of a paralyzing fear of losing him that is, of course, directly resulting in me driving him away.

And I may feel like I have no control over my behavior but it's still my behavior, and the guilt and shame from being unable to control my behavior is just keeping me trapped here.

I've been here before. And it's possible to break the cycle, 'cos I've done it, but it takes forever and some of the consequences really never go away.

I don't have forever. And I don't want to drive him off permanently. And I don't want to worry my friends, my parents, my housemates.

But I still don't want to talk, eat, move, or do anything.

Definition (according to the Merrian Webster Dictionary) de·pres·sion di-ˈpre-shən Function: noun : a psychoneurotic or psychotic disorder marked especially by sadness, inactivity, difficulty in thinking and concentration, a significant increase or decrease in appetite and time spent sleeping, feelings of dejection and hopelessness, and sometimes suicidal tendencies

I have found in my years of "battling depression" (as some put it) that I experience different types of depression. If it is a light depression, I sleep for hours upon hours and I eat a lot. Then, as it gets worse I get back to sleeping less and less, and eating less and less. Clinical Depression is a lovely little trait that is passed down through my family and I, being ever so very lucky, recieved the gene. Depression is more than a hereditary malfunction, it's situational. Sometimes you can be depressed for only a short period of time before you're back on your feet again. Then there's the more serious depression that seems to come upon me every few months where I can't hardly function without my lovely mask that I've so carefully constructed over time. It's in those times that I work, and I work very hard, in order to escape whatever seems to be plaguing my restless mind. On the other hand, shock depression, as I have come to call it, is what hits me whenever a hugely aweful moment, or series of moments has come to smack me in the face. That's when I've been flattened and I don't really know what to do with myself.

Right.

Look up depression. You need to watch for it.

I'm not depressed just because I occasionally get really sad, and I don't want to talk and be aroound people right? That can't hardly be classified as depression. Eveyone has those really shitty days. Right?