It’s not been a great week to be in my mind. You can’t control how or when or for what reason depression will hit you, but it’s been getting me down somewhat recently for a variety of reasons. The events I outlined yesterday are one contributing factor, but as I said there, they aren’t directly affecting me and thus I have to think that the exaggerated feelings of disappointment and upset I have been feeling may be caused by, rather than be the cause of, depression. Or perhaps there’s a whole mess of contributing factors.
I don’t know. And thinking about it inevitably doesn’t help.
One thing that is getting me down a bit at the moment is how far away I am feeling from all my friends. I live in the middle of nowhere a long way away from pretty much everyone I know, and thousands of miles away from the people I talk to literally every day — friends, coworkers, confidantes. I have Andie in my life, a fact which I am incredibly thankful for every day, but that unfortunately doesn’t stop the occasional feelings of loneliness and disconnection.
It’s partly my fault in some cases, of course. When you have disparate, unconnected friendship groups scattered around the globe, it’s difficult to keep up with all of them. (Hell, it’s difficult to keep up with disparate, unconnected friendship groups in the same city sometimes.) Some necessarily fall by the wayside as a sort of natural atrophy. In many cases, this gradual contraction of your worldwide friendship network is a sign that one or all of you have evolved and changed from the people you were when you first knew each other, and you’re just going in directions too different to stay together. In others, yes, it can simply be laziness, but mental states play a role in all this, too, particularly if you struggle with social anxiety as I do — sometimes even the prospect of hanging out with a longtime friend can be terrifying if you haven’t seen them for ages. What if you have nothing to talk about?
Mostly, though, my daily life, my work and my hobbies have led me to the position I am in now, where the vast majority (though not all) of the people that I would consider my closest friends live many thousands of miles away across the Atlantic Ocean, and in some cases even further afield than that. It’s great that I can talk to these people every day thanks to various forms of social media and other online happy funtimes, but sometimes all you want to do is get some people together in the same room, play some couch co-op (or couch competition games like the rather wonderful Hidden in Plain Sight), play some board games, eat some pizza/curry/Chinese/other takeaway goodness and simply, you know chill out together. It happens all too rarely these days.
Ah well. Not a lot I can do about it right now at 1am in the dark in Chippenham, is there? Someday I’ll buy you all a drink. Just probably not all at the same time.
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