Would You Just... Write Anything At All?

Mm. My depression has been bad again guys. I haven't felt able to write. I was drinking too much, as a coping mechanism, spending all my money, trapped in a cycle of anxiety-inducing hangovers and nights out to escape the anxiety. Then I gave up alcohol, but if anything it made me feel worse. Drinking was only a way to feel mild surface pleasure while underwater oceans of sadness roiled below, but at least there was that surface pleasure. Being sober for two months I have felt flat all the time. In stasis. Not running away from my problems, but not confronting them, countenancing them, either.

Has it been worse because I have not been writing, or have I not been writing because it has been worse? I don't know.

I'm in a relationship now with a woman with whom I am in love. I value her and need her a great deal. But wonderful as she is (and infuriating and complicated and intelligent and peculiar), when I am depressed like this she is like the sun above dark storm clouds: I know she is up there, and I am glad, but it is hard to feel her warmth down here in the rain.

I am able to go to work at the moment, and mostly competent and even cheerful when I am there, but as soon as I finish my shift I am hit by a sense of hopelessness I cannot describe. I used to drink to avoid this hopelessness. Recently I have been forcing myself not to drink, and so trudging home instead in the cold grey night, sitting on the bus as icy waves crash against me. Spending evenings and days off watching nothing on Youtube, eating without appetite, spending more and more time in bed. When I see my girlfriend I'm always tired, and just want to put something easy on TV and lie with her and her dog, to have nothing required of me.

I feel like a failure and a fraud for being like this again, for falling back into this pattern after all I wrote earlier in the year, all the lessons I pretended to be learning/teaching. It's like the depression stood through all my attacks against it, paused, laughed, then swallowed me whole.

I haven't been asking for help, because it is embarrassing, it makes people uncomfortable, gets them down. For other people I feel that mental health taboos need to be addressed, that it is all better out in the open. For myself, when I am sick, I feel that I am dirty, and to tell people about it would risk spreading the dirt to them. Better to pretend to be clean and normal, not worry anyone, get through the day, and then go home and collapse.

But I'm writing this. I'm here now. So there's that. Maybe it's time to try again, to try being honest again, to face it all again. It's not going to be easy, but I've reached the point where it has to be better than the stasis, the living death, I have been going through. Let's see what happens...