Depression and what it's really like

Rev, depression puts some shitty filters on our perception. One of the big ones is that we find ourselves over-emphasizing our failures to ourselves, and discounting our many successes. And depression symptoms like anhedonia, sleep difficulties, having difficulty doing things that are important to us, etc., can make tasks that should be tractable (like signing up for classes, feeding oneself, leaving the house) seem almost impossible. For me, once I let a deadline slip, I often become terrified of dealing with the task in question, even if the people I'm accountable to are more than willing to cut me a little slack. And so something that's a week overdue turns into a month, while I keep panicking every time I think of it.

Getting on track with school has to go hand in hand with cultivating good self-care habits and, if you need to, getting into/continuing treatment for depression. Depression's a big old pile of shit. You can kick it in the ass.

I have no idea what to do with myself now which HAS DONE BEEN A PROBLEM IN MY LIFE.

― hemioblock (The Reverend), Wednesday, January 2, 2013 8:48 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Do something non-harmful to get yourself out of your head and into your body. Single most helpful thing my favorite therapist ever told me was that I treat my body like a machine for carrying my head around. Depression is in part a hypertrophy of introspection. Respecting your body is part of easing up on your head.

also sorry for the unsolicited advice, it's my weakness.

I might have to wait another 3 months to go to school which really sucks BECAUSE I FUCKED UP GETTING INTO CLASSES THE QUARTER BEFORE THAT.

fwiw, i can relate. i missed out on my fall semester of culinary school classes partially because i had some outstanding fees i forgot about and i couldn't register in time, and then for some reason i decided against seeing if i could petition in from the waitlist. and the other project i was involved in at the time petered out, leaving me not knowing what the hell to do. at least now i have spring classes lined up, but they don't start for another month.

you know that feeling of any dormancy in your life meaning you're a horrible, non-contributing person? i know it well. i also know what a disgusting, destructive lie it is.

oh sweer rev. let it out, it's okay. if anyone's going to understand it's the ppl itt

it's not true, no matter how true it feels in your head <3

I might have to wait another 3 months to go to school which really sucks BECAUSE I FUCKED UP GETTING INTO CLASSES THE QUARTER BEFORE THAT. AND THE QUARTER BEFORE THAT ONE. AND THE QUARTER BEFORE THAT ONE TOO. AND I DROPPED OUT OF MY CLASSES THE QUARTER BEFORE THAT ONE

This.

yup, i remember those days

Single most helpful thing my favorite therapist ever told me was that I treat my body like a machine for carrying my head around. Depression is in part a hypertrophy of introspection. Respecting your body is part of easing up on your head.

Fucking hell, I was giving myself grief for feeling like that robot/head combination because it seemed distancing. Makes total goddamn sense.

I hate class scheduling mishaps with the fury of a thousand suns. Relate all too well with rev.

ok, making huge leaps and bounds in progress. excellent. i owe my therapist a lot in helping me get here. lately she's starting to refer to her personal beliefs a little, and they sorta sound like the secret or something. like, "because you're more open to opportunities, the universe is making it happen!" and I'm thinking, "oh crap, she better not be talking about The Secret here."

one session a while ago hinted at this that made me a little worried. she had this deck of 'daily affirmation' cards. the kinda thing you'd find in a new age store that sells crystal dragons. the card i took had this Facebook macro-style affirmation on it, and she was dead serious about it!! didn't even play it off like it was sorta corny, sorta helpful.

she recommended an author today called louise hay. i checked her out and this is some real life stuart smalley shit!!! holy crap! i just cracked a joke about him earlier today. check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhG1qjc6jSw

what's y'all thoughts on this? makes me feel a little iffy because, personally, I think this stuff is corny as hell. maybe it's an opportunity to be more open minded though. could be the universe conspiring. or i'm an irredeemably snarky, cynical a-hole.

wooooah, reading more about louise hay, she sounds like a kook. her claim to fame was telling AIDS patients in the early 80s they could heal themselves with their mind. wtf is this.

Personally, I find Louise Hay horrifying. I had a roommate who was way into that. When you publish affirmations to "cure cancer" you're kinda through the looking glass imo. Affirmations are cool to a point, but Hay is kinda next level with it & it's creepy.

But I'm glad that you're making progress, Spectrum!

xpost exactly

thanks vg. yeah, this lady sounds nutso. dunno what to think about my therapist being totally into this woman.

it is totally corny as hell, but maybe works for some ppl? if you are not among them then tell her so

i mean it's definitely worth trying new shit, but there are limits to what's likely to work

they had a copy of you can heal your life in my high school library, my friends & i used to consult it for ailments like constipation & stuff, hee hee

that's funny. i wonder if you made a daily affirmation to make a daily affirmation if it would melt your brain. i just tried it and sorta had a zen moment. i guess that was kinda cool.

hay is nuts, but that doesn't mean your therapist is. even if you dug it, it's not a bad reflection on you. if your therapist has been helpful to this point, there's no reason she can't continue being so. talk about it with her, figure out your own path.
mookie otm. stuff works for people, it's all cool.

but, separately, louise hay *is* bananas.

and regardless of the corniness of positive affirmations or w/e, positive self-talk (and countering negative self-talk) is an important component of recovering from depression & anxiety

it's kind of a matter of framing. Except not the affirmation cure for AIDS that shit is indeed bananas.

yeah, i hear that ... maybe i'll tell her it's not for me and move on, or even give it a whirl. i need to break out of the negative flipside thinking anyway so it couldn't hurt. i mean, a lot of stuff my therapist has done's been pretty helpful, so even if she's into something I think is a little wacky doesn't take away the good stuff. maybe it is an opportunity to be more open minded ... ! universe, you rascal.

My mum once sent me a book she thoguht would help me with my depression/self talk issues, and I was thinking it looked interesting til I started reading it, got about 3 pages in and threw it down in disgust.

Eckhart Tolle is a nut.

You know the book that most helped me to non-cynically consider mindfulness (non-cynically) was Anal Pleasure and Health by Jack Morin, which is sort of about accidentally discovering the world of mindfulness through the microcosm of your anus and rectum. Like Tolle or whatever is just too po-faced and earnest, which is fine for some, but I needed an outer coating of pain-free anal pleasure or something. ZTMI.

I am real with this, even though, I am worried with infrequent posting, and it's all about butts, oh who cares.

is that like 'zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' for butt sex?

is this about awakening the kundalini, or is the guy just a butt freak?

Well it's a book about...anal pleasure and health...with some mindfulness stuff thrown in. I think he is a sex therapist by trade.

spectrum you sound like you're on the right path. and "positive selftalk" def helps so keep on that, whatever it entails.

and remember that constipation is caused by repressing negative energy so much that it goes back down out of your brain into your poop canal and forms a plug of negativity. or something

spectrum, unless you find yourself personally guided through the underworld and purgatory by the shade of the poet Virgil, just figure that you'll pick up clues about the way forward from a lot of odd places, and discard quite a few along the way after you've sucked what you could out of them and they got shriveled and used up in the process.

Just remember to use your hard-won self knowledge to increase your compassion toward others, who are often just as mired down, confused, bashed about, or lost as you.

aimless will u be my spirit guide

if you take every lefthand turning without fail, you can wander in circles at little or no expense; this would probably be simpler and more direct than following my lead on such matters, as I tend to veer about much less predictably.

I think I just ruined everything with my only close friend in the city by letting something totally innocuous she said set me off hysterically crying for a few minutes. I'm trying to hold it together but with my 30th fucking birthday coming up in August it kind of feels pointless now. All the experiences I was desperate to get out of Alabama and over my social anxiety/depression for are never going to happen now, so why should I give a shit?

Sorry you're going through this rough spot, Telephone thing. Is it at all possible that (a) you didn't in fact ruin your friendship for good (your phrase "I think" suggests so); or that, regardless of the former, (b) you may still be able to figure out ways to create experiences of the type you were looking forward to?

I dunno- she hasn't responded to my email and in not going to push it.

As for the other stuff, I'm pushing 30 and I'm less experienced in practically everything than the average person ten years younger than me. I totally missed out on doing anything during my college years and early 20s by being so afraid of being judged or excluded or hurt that I barely left my apartment and I just feel like I'll never get any time to just do normal young adult shit. I want to go out dancing and make mistakes and spend hours talking music or books and just exploring for a while, figuring out who I am and what I want to do, but it's too late now and I'm supposed to be a responsible adult despite having this gaping fucking hole in the middle of my life. I can barely pass through University City without crying my eyes out anymore

Hey TT, sorry things are shitty. I had a similar experience to you - barely tried anything new or crazy during college and early 20s, made very few new friends - because I was scared of people thinking I was uncool or whatever. Just turned 31 and it's only in the past year I'm finally doing stuff I always wanted to do but thought I couldn't/shouldn't. Therapy got me to that point, but I hope you realize it's seriously never too late to act how you want to act, or to figure out what you want/who you are. I think it's a lifelong process anyhow, and there's no right way for people of a certain age to act. Hell, my mom is pushing 60 and she's having a similar experience to me right now. It's great to hear how excited she is that she drove to the city for the first time by herself. :D

But how can I do that with a job that takes up 10 hours a day? No matter what I do I can't pick up my life where I left off, and everyone I know that's my age has long since gotten it out of their system and settled down into a real career or started a family.

and maybe when they're 40 they'll have a freak-out about being too settled and need to get it out of their system once more, and maybe they won't, maybe they'll just grow and change through their lives.

it is easy to romanticise "making mistakes" but I have looked back at past mistakes I could have made and was too shit-scared to, and frankly I'm glad of at least half of them. There are a lot of bullets I dodged by being hyper-afraid of potential bullets. We have a lot of personal freedom, as human beings, and so we spend a lot of time telling ourselves that a bunch of stuff is mandatory and essential and must-have, and that if we only get that mandatory/essential/must-have thing into our lives we will be better for it, and if we haven't got that mandatory/essential/must-have thing in our lives we will always be incomplete, and frankly it's bullshit.

you can still go out dancing and get your heart broken and work out what you want to do at age 30! even with a demanding job! you can still do that stuff at 50, 60, 70, whenever. we've romanticised "your twenties" as a time for working out who you are but frankly society only made that one up recently. it's not like you get to a specific age and suddenly who you are is a fixed and immutable fact.

having "more experience" in all that young adult shit never made anyone i know a better person.

never prevented them from making the same mistake multiple times, either.

i actually came to this thread to vent about how i am currently gnarled up in myself and the problem that is me that I am even more than usual afraid of emotions, such that i have got to the point where acknowledging that I have feelings makes me cry, and so i don't do it, because what kind of crazy person reacts to the question "how's it going?" by crying, when "how's it going" isn't even a question but a generalised phatic noise that people make.

so, i guess, i have 0 room to talk and totally feel you on the "how can this person talk to me again when i am a crying mess over stray comments" thing, but in my experience - and this isn't the first time i've got like this - saying something like "sorry about the hysterical crying, things are kind of overwhelming right now" tends to smooth stuff over ok.

TT: Yeah work makes things harder for sure, especially if your job doesn't energize you (my old one sure didn't) but start really small. Figure out the first steps to doing what you want to do and only do that, and try to feel proud when you do it. And then figure out the next step. When I was first trying that out, I had to go slow and thought that at that rate I'd never accomplish anything, but the momentum shocked me and by the end of the year, I'd done way more than I thought possible. Hope this doesn't sound too much like self-help BS, but your situation sounds so similar to mine that I figured the same thing might work for you.

xp I wish I had the darraghmac knack of thinking of something dry and clever that showed solidarity and sympathy while also flipping to a humorous side but I am Earnest Bot and can only say I hope you un-gnarl, I hope you find a physical or mental environment that is conducive to un-gnarling and you can get through and out of this painful or sad or angry part.

TT, I want to echo what c sharp says. I'm in my late 40s, full-time job, married, two kids, and I can tell you, I'm still in exploratory (and hopefully growing) mode, I'm still staying up late with friends talking books or playing music, and I definitely don't feel like I ever want to stop any of this if I can help it. Frankly, it's the only way I know how to be. I don't think "settling" down equates to settling for a stultifying existence.

Regret is both a tyrant and a liar. By keeping you attached to what could have been, it seeks to rob you of what is and what can be, and it makes you denigrate your own life as it is. I know, believe me. Tell it to fuck off and leave you be. You still have a life, so much life, to live.

I'm supposed to be a responsible adult despite having this gaping fucking hole in the middle of my life.

As a rule of thumb, whenever I see a sentence that starts with "I'm supposed to be..." I find that the remainder of the sentence consists of an expectation imposed upon the person speaking, which the speaker would be much better off disregarding entirely. You must ask yourself, who is doing this supposing, and why?

Others do not live your life and so they cannot know the depth of your feelings or the dimensions of your need. That means their expectations are grounded in pardonable ignorance - and ignorant expectations ought not be in the driver's seat, steering your life away from what is important to your happiness.

i like silby's thoughts in this thread- among other, obv- c#m too, aimless almost always. everyone!

i like that i recognise a lot of the thought patterns people describe in this thread- it reminds me that this shit is normal. it's normal. it's normal. this state of being we're currently forced through until something better comes along often seems to me to be just one confusing decision after another, with hardly any training, warning or useful information, with outcomes that are either terrifyingly murky or murkily terrifying, or both, or i don't know what. how the hell is it normal for a person to hold any concept of their bewildering place in this onrushing present that so rapidly resolves into a ?wtf was that? past. that person who can get through the day, any day, without regrets or the road-less-travelled wonderings or whatever- i don't know if i could recognise a person who exists like that (and i know loads of them!) as 'normal'. they're alien to me. tomorrow keeps me awake most tonights.

i don't suffer from depression, i don't think. but i do think these thoughts, constantly, have these regrets, constantly, feel that my stupid self is holding back my other self who's really quite bright and capable, constantly. feel that there's no way to ever recover from the historical stupidity of my stupid self- sorry bout that future self. i hope that makes anyone with anything like these thoughts -and i hope not to be too presumptuous in at least feeling myself some recognition in some of the posts above- feel a little more normal.

also i random spotted this absolute gem, and i mean cmon folks give it up.

does this mean i can drink energy drinks with impunity?

― thread lock holiday (Noodle Vague), Friday, 12 October 2012 08:14 (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if the gp asks if you're still playing fm as hull, are you gonna answer truthfully?

― Randy Carol (darraghmac), Friday, 12 October 2012 10:21 (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if energy drinks are going to help get the job done then by all means drink them with impunity, whatever it takes is my motto.

― estela, Friday, 12 October 2012 12:04 (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

estela agreeing with nv on what they both know to be a small evil - imp-unity

― Randy Carol (darraghmac), Friday, 12 October 2012 12:07 (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

imp-unity do you SEE

:s energy drinks are just too expensive for something that's not going to deaden my brain

on a brighter note i made it thru a whole week back at work on time and looking vaguely efficient yay me victory for the forces of apathy

in the debit column is pretty much everything else but sacrifices must be made for the greater goo

hmmm, think i finally cracked it. apparently being rejected by your parents screws ya up ... whodathunkit. now i wish i just had depression. i'm not sure my current therapist is equipped to deal with this.

ah crap, i'll be alright.