I don’t feel great.
Posted by: Laura on: July 13, 2009
In fact I’d go so far as to say I feel awful.
The past couple of days, I’ve slowed down almost to a stop. Still hardly sleeping but finding it more and more difficult to get out of bed. Feeling constantly on the brink of tears. Getting irritable with everyone. Wanting to be alone but resenting every minute of it. I’m moving slowly, talking quietly, struggling with everything. The lethargy infiltrates every moment, action and thought.
Trying to think straight whilst depressed is like trying to run with your legs tied together. I wish I could clear it, it’s like a fog that comes along and clouds up my brain until I find myself sitting around for ages without even thinking anything, and when I do think it’s just stupid, self-pitying bullshit.
I don’t want to be like this. There is no upside. It’s not interesting or cool. It’s just horrible. I want to be happy and cheerful and optimistic and hopeful. I don’t want every thought I ever have to sooner or later progress to thoughts of suicide. I don’t want it to feel like the first and most sensible option. I don’t want it to feel inevitable.
I want to think properly, and feel properly. I want ordinary happiness and ordinary sadness.
I want some fucking control.
But it won’t happen, of course. I won’t make it happen. And that is yet another reason to hate myself. Because I don’t want it, but I won’t fix it. Because I complain, but don’t change.
I’m spending huge amounts of my time in elaborate fantasy worlds, pretending I’m someone else, people I’ve made up. Just avoiding real life – but I can’t do that all the time.
I’m awful to be around. I’m dull and stupid and awkward. And I feel so isolated here. When I was at uni, even when I was depressed and hiding away, I could hear my flatmates moving and talking to each other, and I could walk to the shop or get a bus into town or go for a walk and see lots of people but never have to speak to them. But here, I don’t really go out, but I do see my family and have to talk to them, and I’m really not brilliant at conversation right now.
I just feel like crap, to be honest.
3 Responses to "I don’t feel great."
Same boat here, which is probably why I found your blog. All I can do is share some analysis of things, but unfortunately I think we both know we’ve tried just about everything so I won’t blow smoke up your ass.
I notice that there’s a nasty catch-22 cycle where-by we are stuck being lonely, isolated, sad, and depressed and yet when opportunities come-by to abate those things we intentionally reject them and ironically with the same kind of negative energy too. In my case it’s as if there is a demon in my head forcing me to remain the way I am. It sort of has a personality of its own and I recognize it does not relate to any inclinations I have towards my true self. But it’s very strong and it usually takes a bit of an ass-kicking from a friend to beat it down any.
Suppose it is a demon, then I would consider some charismatic religious deliverance from demonic oppression. Except I have tried that before and saw no changes. I also recognize that the attention I gave to any kind of religious system in the past two decades has contributed to this problem. It’s amazing how religious folks assert redemption and deliverance etc. and so on, but at the end of the day I just know I would have been better-off without any religious influence at all.
A friend recently wrote an apology letter to me accompanied by a “mix CD” and reclaimed our friendship. This came as a surprise to me and realized I had a strong impulse to ignore the apology and be-little it instead of seeing it for what it was: a friend, all the way back from high-school, who values me. I think I’ve been waiting for quite some time evidence of friends who genuinely value me.
It’s all been quite confusing, here’s one example why: there’s a cutie at the office here I went out with once and then not again when I decided that due to her cold energy she would never appreciate me. (It’s more likely she was taught to be reserved and not show attraction so quickly). The weird part is all the guys in the office are swooning over her yet every now and then she drops little hints wondering why I dropped the ball. I want her but I don’t. A little deeper digging reveals that I want to be appreciated and there is where my insecurity lies (and where the “demon” pushes me around). This is why I’m so caught-up in friendships at this stage of life and why I am so sick of anything even remotely romantic and/or sexual. I’m even sick of snogging.
I bring-up the sexual aspect of my story because I thought for “decades” that having a girlfriend would make my pain go away. Then when I finally had opportunities, and pursued, to my astonishment I wasn’t even remotely satisfied with myself. The pain persisted. I wasted decades chasing after the wrong lights. This revealed more potential reasons and sources for my pain and so it could have began a long time ago and be actually very very unexpected.
My only sense of peace and solace right now is a fay obsession with astronomy, astrophysics, geophysics, evolution, abiogenesis et al. Building a video game right now based on this but the depression stuff is so damn distracting I feel helplessly trapped and guilty when sitting in-front of my computer on a friday or a saturday night. I should be out snogging with someone and making them feel good right? This is where the cycle begins yet again.
I think I’ll wrap this up with just one more thing to say: I used to be overcome with anxiety and now I almost never experience anxiety (or at least anxiety as I once knew it). I do feel much better than I did and I attribute this success to a technique a life coach taught me. Every time you have a negative thought you catch-it, recognize it, let it go, and have faith it will be replaced with positive. The trick is to do this EVERY TIME it occurs. He told me he cured his stuttering problem this way and the first day he had to catch himself over a hundred times. The next day it was just under a hundred times. Eventually, through perserverence, he cured it. I tried it with my anxiety and I definitely noticed a huge change after a couple of months.
How rude of me not to leave a little goodbye:
Bye for now and for what it’s worth, my life coach says that there is a way out, there is.
1 | Nick
July 13, 2009 at 4:58 pm
I know exactly how you feel, I am the same way
wish i could offer some words of advice but i don’t know where to go from here