The thing people who have been fortunate enough to have never been afflicted with debilitating depression don't always understand is that the whole experience is more than just being "a bit sad", and thus it's not something you can just "snap out of" or "cheer up" from. (To be clear, those scare quotes are purely hypothetical; no-one has actually been disrespectful enough to declare my current feelings non-valid.) I suspect it's something that is different for everyone who experiences it, so today I thought I'd talk a bit about how I feel when I get like this.
For me, it's like being inside a bubble of sorts. I can see the world going on around me; I can hear it; I can even interact with it. But I feel an almost total disconnect from it. It's like I'm on a slightly different plane of existence; reality kept at arm's length. Close enough to be familiar and still just about within reach, under most circumstances, but far enough away to making going about normal, everyday things varying degrees of "challenging", ranging from "begrudging reluctance" all the way up to "this feels like a completely insurmountable task that I will never be capable of". And the challenge factor doesn't necessarily relate directly to how difficult the actual task is; as an example, the simple act of talking to people I know and like right now feels very much like it's up around the "insurmountable" end of the scale. Not quite there, because I can just about carry on a conversation right now, but not something I am deliberately seeking out if I absolutely do not have to.
It can be disconcerting, and the description of it as a "bubble" is perhaps not the best one; bubbles, after all, are fragile, delicate things that can be popped at a moment's notice, while whatever encloses my mind at times like this is much more… solid-seeming. And it weighs you down; it drains the energy and vitality from your mind and body, and makes, as I say, just going about your regular, everyday business feel like an enormous effort; a toil that never ends.
And the worst thing is that being in this state is weirdly addictive. I recognise this about myself. I recognise that when I get into a state like this, something in my brain almost wants to remain this way, even though another little voice in my brain knows that it's unproductive and unhelpful, both to myself and to the people around me. It becomes a battle between different aspects of my consciousness, I guess; the more primal, emotional part of myself wants to continue to wallow in the darkness because there's a strange sort of comfort there, while what I would probably describe as the more high-functioning, pragmatic part of myself wants to tell me to… just do something, whether that's a simple thing like doing something enjoyable that might take my mind off things, or something more complex and long-term that might lead to some sort of solution (or at least resolution) to the problem I'm experiencing.
At the moment, the primal part is winning. I am right in the depths of that bubble, and normality feels a very long way away. I don't know if it's slipping further away or getting closer, either; the feeling changes from moment to moment. Sometimes I feel like I am just going to have to accept that Something Bad has happened and try to move on from it; at others, I feel like I described the other day, like everything has come to a screeching halt until this particular "episode" of my life has concluded in some fashion.
This is all very abstract I know, and I'm almost certainly mixing metaphors and whatnot. But this also just happens to be the sort of musings that dribble forth from my brain at times like this, as particularly longstanding readers of this blog will be well aware, I'm sure.
I have little doubt that I will eventually manage to make it through this particularly bleak period of my life one way or another; I have survived plenty of other episodes like this in the past, and I'm sure there are plenty more to come in the future. But right now, if I seem a bit off, or if I don't really want to talk, or you get the distinct impression I just want to be left alone… well, as I said the other day, it's probably not you, and it is most definitely me.
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