as small as a world and as large as alone

1:36pm May 10, 2013

clatterbane:

adriofthedead:

bloodmothers:

pleatedjeans:

Depression Part 2 by Hyperbole and a Half is the most important thing you’ll read all day.

wow

I know everyone and their mother has probably reposted this link already but, please please please read this. It’s really the most accurate and straightforward description of depression I’ve ever read

Especially the part with the dead fish

A lot of people who don’t really understand depression reduce it to simply just “being sad a lot”, when it’s actually much more than that. If I could try and boil it a single phrase it’d be more like “long periods of intense apathy punctuated by feelings of helplessness”. It’s not about just feeling sad, it’s more or less about not… really feeling anything. All while still trying to deal with going about day-to-day life and holding tight to whatever sort of distractions you can manage to care about enough to find, just to keep yourself from thinking about it too much.

Glad she’s able to start posting again.

This experience actually sounds more like what I got from bad reactions to a couple of medications…for depression. But, it works differently for everybody.

The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief.  I had always wanted to not give a fuck about anything. I viewed feelings as a weakness — annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over myself. And I finally didn’t have to feel them anymore.

But my experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there’s a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck. Cognitively, you might know that different things are happening to you, but they don’t feel very different.

Advanced zombie level: when you know intellectually that it’s just not right that you suddenly can’t give a fuck about anything, but are also totally unable to give enough of a fuck about that to even try to do anything about it. (Also, when people around you view that as improvement because you’re not crying as much…)

I have tended more toward staying in the “nothing but feelings” space, with the depression being pretty much totally an exaggerated reaction to actual things that were going on in my life. (Though it was treated as just inexplicable neurotransmitter storms for years, because nobody else wanted to look at the not-so-great situation.) But, that version is not a lot of fun, either. To put it mildly.

Also, I particularly had to get a (sympathetic) chuckle at the “when you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable” section. Though, IME, more from trying to avoid “inappropriate” displays of emotion than finding one to try to express at all.

But, yeah, “everyone feels sad sometimes” just doesn’t come anywhere close to covering it.

Yeah. I’ve gone through about equal parts of over-intense (but seriously skewed) feelings, and the giant black hole of nothingness and more nothingness and more nothingness. And people do a serious amount of Not Getting It about both kinds. I was able to eventually find ways out, but they involved years and years and years and years and years of applying specific cognitive techniques without seeming to get anywhere at all for a really long time (except that I was, the depressive haze just obscured that all and made it look like I was endlessly walking in circles), combined with being out of the situations that set it off and made it worse.

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