Depression and what it's really like

one of the worst parts of depression is wondering whether your feelings are VALID or just a function of needing a dosage change or whatever. is it okay to feel terrible because we live in a terrible world, or do i not take my own thoughts seriously because i have a psychological disorder?

Aren't you job hunting atm? That's enough to make anyone feel blue.

yeah, part of it is constantly checking my cell phone and e-mail and getting deafening silence.

your feelings are always valid

Man that's the worst -- if it were me, I'd go for a really long walk but really you just gotta distract your brain. Podcast time?

your feelings are always valid

not even so much a matter of valid or invalid. feelings just arise and there they are. then you have to deal with them.

it's just such a nightmare sci-fi scenario not to be able to trust your own brain.

your feelings are always valid

not even so much a matter of valid or invalid. feelings just arise and there they are. then you have to deal with them.

― Aimless, Monday, June 24, 2013 6:49 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

someone once gave me a stern talking to wrt this: "don't ever apologize about your feelings." valid or not, they represent a basic component of your consciousness to work with.

did something trigger this onset?

thanks to the good weather i've been able to be of two minds and extricate myself from the mire of my self-loathing and see that, oh, i ate/drank/smoked like shit recently and didn't sleep well/have indegestion like a motha'/etc so now my body can't bootstrap motivation. realizing this, i ate a bunch of fruit all day and drank a bunch of coffee and took it easier on myself, and now i feel better. the slog of job hunting/situating your life just right/building a house will always be there. if i may be platitudinous, bind your heart to that deep down shit that you hold dear, and put the mind to strategy.

i kind of wish this was on 77. anyway, i'm sorry to hear about all of the problems everyone is having, but i am heartened by the fact that, for the most part, everyone is thinking about their issues in positive, productive ways.

the issue i am having is that i live at home, and it is irritating to me how my family is, i think, in denial about how serious my depression can get... they tend to think it is something in the past, that is over. and that's fine usually, i probably encourage this by not sharing things with them and pretending everything is okay most of the time. but like, it is a think i actively combat every day and lately, the facade is pretty difficult to maintain. they seem to get uncomfortable even when i use euphemisms like "i am not feeling well lately". this is causing me frustration, and i find myself feeling resentful of them, which makes me feel guilty, which makes me feel more depressed, etc. i kind of have more specific things to say but i feel bad "shit talking" my family. i think, basically, what needs to happen is i need to accomplish my goals of 1.) getting some job in new york and 2.) moving to new york. i need distance from my family, whom i love, but who i feel too indebted to, or something...

maybe the problem is on my end. i feel guilty for not "living up to my potential" because of my depression, especially because this is not a thing that i think my family understands, and that i am kind of embarrassed of anyway. like, i'm not really candid with them that it wasn't just that i had difficulty "applying myself" freshman year of college when i barely passed a bunch of classes, it was that i was crying in my room all time and also couldn't sleep more than a few hours at a time. idk. the thing that works best is staying positive... like, i like to think it was a good thing that i at least had a brush with depression because it has made me more empathetic.

anyway, good luck to everyone out there. i just needed to write some things out and look at them. my main problem is guilt, i guess... my depression centers on feeling guilty and worthless. i don't think there is an external source for this, i think it's just how i am for some reason.

also, on a related note, i don't need, and probably don't even want, the external validation of my feelings from my parents -- that wouldn't help me at all. i just realized that, i think, after writing out my last post. it's better they think i am fine and it is a good thing, not a bad thing, that i am able to "pass" as happy so easily.

also: is there such a thing as reverse seasonal affective disorder? i always feel better in the winter. in the summer i feel out of step with the rhythms and the beauty of nature, and like i am missing out on something.... fun, i guess.

Treeship, you are a grand dude. Feeling guilty toward your family comes with being depressed. Your family, in your view, being "in denial" or not rating your depression like you do is integral to depression. You can't expect them to understand what it's like, for it is out of their realm. Plus, I am pretty sure they just want the best for you, nothing more but certainly nothing less. Don't underestimate their love and care for you simply because they do not understand your depression. Parents don't even understand the musical taste of their kids most of the time, let alone what really goes on within you, as a whole person, instead of just their child.

You are not just your parents child, you are your own person. Your parents not "getting" your depression kind of goes with the territory. Parents by default struggle with that. And it is also a defense mechanism; it would literally kill them of sadness if they knew the magnitude of your depression.

Don't berate your parents for not "understanding" your depression, is all I am saying. It's difficult enough to understand it yourself, you are asking too much if you want them to understand it too. As you say now in a later post, you wouldn't even want validation from your parents of this. It just goes against the parents-child dynamics, most of the time.

They want nothing but the best for you, I am sure. Asking them to understand your depression and validate it in the way you wish them to, is probably stretching it, is all I am saying.

Reading that back now, I don't mean to stick up for parents. All I mean to say is, your parents will never understand the magnitude of your depression. And I am speaking from experience.

thanks for your response le bateau ivre. i think you are totally right about everything. they are good parents, and have helped me out with everything i needed help with in my life. at this point what i need to be focused on is staying motivated to accomplishing my goal of relative financial independence/living in nyc where most of my friends live, and where i've always wanted to move. i am feeling stalled and discouraged right now and that is magnifying my normal brain chemistry issues, which i think are relatively under control at this point.

i think as far as my parents go, the main thing is that sometimes they will say stuff like "i wish we had instilled more confidence in you" and like... i become resentful, because that is not the root of my problems. but then again, i am hypersensitive to this stuff because of my feelings of guilt/indebtedness to them. there are worse problems, honestly.

btw, i've been meaning to ask you what your newspaper is called. i know i can't read it bc it's in dutch, but i'm just curious. thanks again for your response.

Exactly. You know where your focus should lie, as hard as it is. Go for your own your goals in life.

I can totally relate to feeling resentful and/or guilty when they say things like that. I've been there. I've been told "I wish you weren't so sensitive, I wish you would just be better, what did we do wrong" etc. Guilt trip from hell ensured. But what can you do? Indeed, there are worse problems. But also better opportunities. In finding your own way in life, going after your own goals. Your parents are the least of your worries, I think.

it's true. that's what life's about... moving on and forging your own path. it's just hard to see that clearly when i'm like, still living in my childhood bedroom.

XP aw <3

I am very hesitant to disclose the name of my paper on here, but will tell you on 77 somewhere tomorrow.

sounds good.

Yeah, that's tough, dealing with your parents, your youth and the parent-child dynamic in your face all the time, when you are still living with them.

Brian Eno is eternal for creating the Oblique Strategy card that says simply “Go outside. Shut the door.”

Not a universal panacea, but when you've been inside for several days the outside starts looking apocalyptic.

weirdly, i was gonna quote that earlier tonight in response to this tweet:

Who has the screenshot of the "it's ableist to tell someone to go outside" tweet

inside, outside, it's all the same

Oh man Treeship, I can so relate. I couldn't find work for several months after college, and I felt awful living at home, even though my parents were fine with it. I needed to move out and grow, but didn't have the means to do so. Not to mention being stuck in the house made me more depressed and curtailed my efforts to job search. And my parents didn't understand what I was going through at the time either. To go counter to LBI a little, if you feel angry towards your parents for not understanding you, feel angry! Even if it's not their fault, it's totally valid for you to feel that way. You don't have to take out that frustration or anger on them, but don't censor your internal feelings with guilt. Nothing good lies that way, I promise! And sometimes the anger/frustration can be a motivating factor to make you take action to improve the situation. It sounds like you know what to do to move on, so good luck.

it's rough, but i kind of take heart in the fact that a lot of people are in the same boat and i've done things to fill my time over the past two years. at this point i think my resume is solid enough i should be able to find full-time employment in nyc, and i just need to remain confident about that and not read a bunch of stuff on the internet decrying the uselessness of humanities degrees. i'm happy with my degree though. the things i learned in college are a huge part of who i am and i wouldn't trade them for a million dollars. two million, though, maybe.

if you want to get a job in NYC, a humanities degree is a pretty good start. i have an English degree and haven't had a problem making a living with it. it's not champagne and benzes, but for my lifestyle it leaves more than enough in savings + apartment and other such. so i don't think you should worry about that aspect of things. i lived in a big apartment in Williamsburg at 22 y/o with plenty of money in the bank thanks to my no-name college humanities degree. the key w/ that, though, is hustle. if you do the legwork you can do it.

what industry were you in, if I may ask?

when is started i was a marketing/branding writer in-house for a corporation. now i'm another kind-of in-house corporate writer. not exactly glam, but it's steady and pays the bills.

ah, i see. just curious

huh, why did I think you worked at a law firm?

And yeah, Treeship, reverse SAD is totally a thing. It's like, I should be traveling & going swimming & going to cook-outs or whatever it is people do during the summer, but really half the time it just feels desolate, empty and smothering. At least in the fall and winter being down seems properly atmospheric, but in the spring & summer when you're depressed it just feels like all the beauty and verdancy are taunting you.

thanks for verifying that emilys, yeah... because that is totally a thing i deal with and i haven't heard it mentioned before.

Summer also = all of media is full of happy families on vacation and/or half-naked bodies splashing around in crystal clear water. Total bombardment of images telling you that you ought to be happy which is bound to have an effect on anyone who isn't.

here all of you on the summertime blues shit. the worst are cheap american beer commercials where everyone's on the beach, and there's a bonfire and a DJ and dudes chillin with young women in bikinis, having a great time drinking cans of Coors Light they keep in a styrofoam cooler they bought at 7-11 in their flipflops and cargo shorts and their shoddy plastic sunglasses hanging from their faded sports t-shirts. i look at that, look at my life, and i dream of walking into traffic.

in other news i realized i got an official diaqnosis. major depressive disorder, moderate recurrent. feels so satisfyingly clinical.

Yo why are you letting the fakest and most manufactured images possible in all of society be what you measure ANYTHING by??? Come the fuck on, you are way smarter than that; if you want to wallow, wallow, but don't pretend that's not what you're doing.

Also if those people in the ad were real and you had to spend a whole day with them, it would be like torture. Pretty sure about this.

sorry, that was sorta tongue-in-cheek, i just find that kinda stuff funny and absurd. sentiment's the same though, 4th of July and all... family friend BBQ fun day with fireworks, and i'm sittin here gettin stoned and chain smoking. guess it could be worse.

tuff love from in_orbit is OTM -- don't let the beer commercials fool you. those ppl are actors, acting. they undoubtedly have plenty of misery in their lives.

xpost uhhh.. getting stoned rules.

ugh flipflops

haven't been 'depressed' outright, my anxiety was out of control for a while but seems to be stable for the last few months. But I'm having a hard time with self-image, and constantly feel like when I'm discussing anything with anybody that I'm automatically wrong and should just shut up (even when I'm clearly not). As well, I've found it hard to date because I'm too unhappy with myself atm to have the confidence necessary to strike up an earnest conversation.

really have just decided to keep being social and hanging with friends and new people, but to wait to date again until I've gotten grounded again like I was back in 2010.

gonna go to a 4th of July party today and kick back brews with good peeps.

and constantly feel like when I'm discussing anything with anybody that I'm automatically wrong and should just shut up (even when I'm clearly not).

You know this anyway, but this is a fairly good sign of you being right, or at least, you're not assuming you're right about everything which wd being its own problems

yeah. and I did have one of those phases in my early 20s (I mean, I'm sure we all do at some point).

I think part of it also has come with me getting older and feeling like I owe it to the world to be responsible and have 'opinions' on things. Where sometimes, it's ok not to have one if you don't know enough about the subject. and it's always ok to 'change' it when presented with new evidence.

u otm tho

Somewhere on this thread is the phrase "a self-pitying streak a mile wide", which I have been dwelling on lately, because yes, I do have one. I feel like as a kid I learned that feeling sorry for me was the one positive response I could effectively trigger in other people, and now it's a habit I can't shake off.

I've wallowed in problems for years and every minor setback is a disaster and prompts floods of tears and complete learned helplessness. I ruined my last relationship, according to my ex, because I was "always so negative" and not working hard enough to overcome my problems (sure, him meeting some young blonde PhD-studying fitness chick instead of my fat university-drop-out arse seems like a trigger too but apparently that was a mere sideshow). I've let opportunities at work pass me by without knowing why, and I'm beginning to wonder if I'm self-sabotaging because some stupid subconscious part of me believes there are more pats in the head in life down the route of being a go-nowhere fuckup.

Which is obviously not true! I don't even know anyone to feel sorry for me any more because my incorrigible whining nature has long since driven everyone away and is obviously not a great magnet for new friends. Plus I know I've found other people in the past draining because whatever good or bad things happened they only ever wanted to talk about the same ancient sticking point, and I know I don't find other people's feelings enormously interesting, so why do I sit here like a toddler refusing to go on a nice day out because other people aren't listening to mine?

I dunno. Sorry if this doesn't seem like the right thread. It seemed more on-topic when I started. But, how can I get over being self-pitying? How can I stop feeling left out that other people are not feeling sorry for me, forget about how wronged I feel over whatever minor details, and get on with life?

"learned helplessness" is a Martin Seligman phrase, and for all my initial hostility i can't help but feel he talks a lot of sound, scientific sense. maybe check out one of his books on Learned Optimisim? i'm pretty convinced now that thinking style and the way we respond to setbacks and difficulties is a) ingrained from childhood, b) responsible for a lot of depression and c) capable of being relearned.

i'm on the waiting list for cognitive behavioural therapy to address these issues - i don't see it as a panacea and i'm sure it will be hard work but i know other people on this thread and this board have had positive experiences with it. your intuition that the way you think about setbacks doesn't help you get over them is true, i think, but that's no cause for self-recrimination. recognizing the possibility of a different way of thinking seems like the first step. i see in myself over the last few weeks a difference in the way i talk to myself and the way i think about, um, LYFE that if i can sustain it is gonna make me fuck myself over a lot less often, i hope. it's not like we can make shit not happen, but i believe we can cultivate a better response to the happening of shit.

"Optimisim" is not really a thing, obv

I should reread that Seligman book (perhaps I mean "finish reading", because I don't think I did), because I did like and relate to the early chapters, and not just have a strop about the chapter where he goes "according to our personality test the applicants who lied most about everything being great made the most profitable insurance salesmen, so I told the managing directors that only optimists should ever have a job"

ahem. there I go refusing to get out of my rut again.

anyway, yeah. I have my first session with a new CBT practitioner soon and am trying to get some issues prioritised in my head before that. I think the service is really only intended as a 5-session emergency response to major depressive breakdowns and not for the working out of longer term issues but hopefully it can be a starting point to work out what I actually need.

is there any particular approach you've found useful to changing the way you think/describe situations to yourself/etc over the past few weeks? glad you've been making some progress, hope it continues to work out for you

i guess i've focused more on "what are the practical problems i can address?" than worrying about the underlying shit? like when i catch myself giving it "oh poor me i am gonna be lonely forever" i've tried to stop thinking that pretty quick and recognize it as some shit i tell myself so i can do something destructive.

as i understand it the point of CBT is precisely not to address what might be underlying, but to look at the surface mechanics because they can be worked on. i have a problem with that too, and a problem with Seligman every time he talks about stock portfolios, but yeah i was using it to avoid, i think. i can take those ideas that seem proven to work and try to make myself less self-defeating without giving up things i believe. and maybe i can go after the underlying stuff once i've learned to do that without feeling crushed by existential despair? but maybe i won't want to.

there's a difference between shallow acceptance of the status quo and welcoming acceptance of the craziness that is life, i hope. i tried to do the latter for years but my own sourness got in the way.

i dunno, every effort to get better feels glib, sometimes. but focusing the problem on my attitude feels like a plan. i can't stop society being a mess and i can't make other people be different, but i think i can learn to not get so worked up about the dumb shit i can't change - if i can learn to do that, i'll worry about what happens next afterwards

Recognise a lot of what you describe aps.

Youse two are two of my faves. Hopefully kicking the ass out of this wont turn yis into happygolucky bores but if it does i guess i could live with the tradeoff. I guess.

thx dude. it's taken a long time to recognize some differences between wallowing in my own problems/being inescapably stuck in them/being responsible for everything that ever happens to me and all the rest. secretly i know there's a slice of me that derives much comfort from being effed right up.