It’s really hard to put into words how I
feel when I’m depressed. There’s no words strong enough to do my feelings
justice and if you’ve never experienced depression yourself, you can only try
to imagine how terrible it really feels. No one can understand the true horror
of depression unless they’ve felt it first-hand. If you’ve never been
clinically depressed your body just isn’t programmed to feel such strong
negative emotions, to hit a low that reaches deeper than any low you have ever
experienced. Lucky you.
I have panic attacks, anxiety attacks,
full on mental breakdowns that all occur just out of the blue. I can literally
be perfectly happy and not have a worry in the world one minute and then all of
a sudden this rush washes over me and I feel scared, although I don’t know of
what, my mind is blank yet racing with thoughts at the same time, I forget
everything I was doing, everything I should be doing, everything I am and I
just become overwhelmed with negativity – it’s like I’m under water, drowning,
being tossed around by a giant wave with no way of knowing when it’ll stop, if
it’ll stop, if I’ll ever get the chance to come up for air. My chest feels
tight, it’s hard to breath. I start shaking and crying, gasping and
hyperventilating. I need to get somewhere safe immediately – my bed, the arms
of my boyfriend, my mom or my sister. It goes on for hours like this. Every
time I start to feel a little calmer and the tears have managed to stop flowing
then another rush comes over me. There’s no trying to stop it, to get a hold of
myself, my brain can’t even fathom how to go about doing that. All I have to do
is wait; endure the pain of it all until it comes to its natural end. Needless
to say, I feel off for the rest of the day. I can’t shake the feeling of what
happened. I feel sad, down, lonely, tired. I just want to fall asleep and hope
I sleep right through until the next day.
I cry a lot. I’ve heard that crying may
mean you’re not dealing with depression but simply grief because as I explained
in a previous post (Depression vs. Sadness), your mood produces emotional
symptoms, whereas the symptoms of depression are more physical. But I’ve always been a very emotional person, I’ve always
turned to crying as a way to release the feelings built up inside me and so I
think my excessive crying now is due not to the temporary mood of grief, but to
grieving for the loss of myself that depression has caused. I don’t recognize
myself any more, and sometimes no matter how hard I try, I can’t get back to
the way I used to be and this scares me. So whenever people ask me how I’m
doing, whenever I’m forced to talk about my depression, I get a lump in my
throat and the tears start swelling up behind my eyes and no matter how hard I
try, it eventually becomes too much and I break down crying.
Sometimes I’ll be sitting by myself and
I just start crying out of nowhere. All of a sudden this feeling of frustration
over takes me and I can’t escape it. I bring my knees to my chest, put my
forehead on my knees, and grab at my hair with both hands, pulling on my hair
because I feel so overwhelmed, so frustrated, so broken.
I get irritated a lot and lose my
temper. When people do things that I used to find funny and playful, I now have
no patience for them and they cause me to be annoyed. The littlest things set
me off and I argue a lot more than I used to. I also can’t concentrate – my
mind either feels overwhelmed and jumps from one idea to the next, making it
impossible for me to make up my mind or I stare blankly ahead while my mind is
off in la-la land, thinking of absolutely nothing, just wasting time away.
Most of the time I have zero motivation
to do anything. There’s lots of things I’d like to do, and often I’ll sit there
staring at things, willing myself to just pick them up and start doing
something, but I just can’t. There’s no explanation for it. There’s just this
force within me that is holding me back. It’s terrible, because I’m so bored,
but no matter how strong the boredom, I can’t bring myself to do anything.
Sometimes I can’t even read or watch TV or do mindless tasks. I just sit there,
staring off in the distance. Sometimes I go days without showering because it
just seems like such a huge chore. I love to cook but I barely eat decent meals
anymore because I just don’t feel like making them. I live for nature and the
outdoors but most of the time I can’t bring myself to get dressed let alone
leave the house, even to just go sit in my back yard for a bit. It takes me
hours to fall asleep at night, usually I’m not asleep until 4am and then I
never want to wake up and get out of bed in the morning. By the time I’m up
it’s almost lunch time and I’ve wasted half my day just lying in bed. I used to
be extremely active (sports, gym, yoga, zumba) but now I do none of that; it’s
just too much effort. I’ve become lazy, but not a kind of laziness I can
control. It’s not like I don’t want to do these things and rather sit around
doing nothing, definitely not! I would love to be my active self again, but I
just can’t. Again, there’s that imaginary force holding me back.
Most days I get out of bed and go sit in
my recliner, I drink a tea and spend the whole day reading. I only get up to go
to the bathroom, snack on something that doesn’t require time to make or to
refill my tea. I feel like each day just blends right into the next one, it’s
all a blur. My life is passing me by. Days have turned into weeks, into months
and now into years of me doing absolutely nothing with my life. It saddens me
that I’m missing out on so much, that I’m missing out on being a regular 24
year old girl, that I can’t hold on to a job and don’t even have enough money
to live off of let alone go out and have a good time with my friends doing all
the activities I dream of one day doing again. I try to get things done each
day to change my situation, even if just a little, but it’s terribly hard to notice
any progress. I’m determined to turn all this around and be my happy self again
but sometimes I just feel stuck.
No comments:
Post a Comment