Depression and what it's really like

Spent my whole life feeling like the greatest thing I could ever do for the world is to not be alive. Fuck this feeling.

I feel guilty, I feel awful, I really do wish I were dead.

those feelings aren't at all the whole of who you are. hope you can keep telling yourself that. everybody here will tell you the same.

crabbits, there is a giant green parisian buttplug that proves that there will always be herefotore unrealized and delightful ways of conferring benefits upon the world

Un plug anal géant de 24 m de haut vient d'être installé place Vendôme ! Place #Vendome défigurée ! Paris humilié !

Sent u a msg crabbye

crabbits yr fb reel is a constant delight out of any and all ilxors I'm p certain yr vvvv high in the 'daily good done in the world' category and I hope v much that there's clear times when you feel it as confidently

srsly crabbits you're the best

^^^fact

crabbits there should be a bitchin comic book series about u & yr world

i hope that you don't leave this world but i deeply understand that feeling

I'm just exhausted from this constant inner warfare today. I don't know what's triggered it, but the last couple of weeks life has been tasting like bile, and I'm so so tired of it. I can still function in the world, but I just want to go somewhere and hide .... not so much from everyone else but from myself. I'm so tired of being inside of myself, my habitual thought loops so tedious and painful.

I'm an atheist, pretty much always have been, but I flirt with the notion of becoming a believer in God of some sort. It's from a wretched, needy state, a state where I simply crave some Being to love me and carry my pain somehow. A Being that helps me go beyond the prison of the self so I can enjoy the beauty in the world again. This suburb I live in is a parched desert. There are trees everywhere, but everywhere I see only Death. Everything is already dead. I see things, but they are not real. I can't taste or smell life anymore. It's bleached, ravaged of meaning or joy.

I am very very sad.

Why do I even post these things? It's not going to help anyone.

Sometimes you have to let the pus out, man.

I sort of started privately talking to God, whether or not he/she/it is real, just to ask for forgiveness when my brain is kicking its own ass and making me feel like horrible, guilty shithead who should be dead and not alive. 'I am really beating myself up over this thing, dear God please forgive me,' I think. It helps. It helps me feel better! I don't go to church or anything, and sometimes I like to imagine the god as a tiny dancing popsicle like at the end of Borgel by Daniel Pinkwater.

lol love that, crabbits

feeling somewhat less stuck today. it's been achieved mainly by simply not brooding so much on myself. trying to really focus on other people, genuinely so. truth is, i could spend several lifetimes bemoaning my problems and shortcomings. no lack of grist for the mill. but that way madness lies.

distraction is the way

I dont know if I am depressed or not. I have always felt powerless but accepted it and internalized it. Now im doing something different, a career change, a new start. But what should be empowering I'm finding very challenging and I feel quite despondent a lot of the time which I never did before because I lived in a bubble of pretending the real world didnt exist.

I'm engaged, im not procrastinating, I'm throwing everything at it because I feel if i stop, it will be over. All of it, not just this but everything and yet I welcome that feeling. Ive had enough! Ive been living away for a short time and can go days without speaking to people and...Ive realized how much I love it! Silence! But im in a bubble, I'm living off savings and eventually I will have to return to the real world and I'm not sure that I want to, especially with an uncertain future that I'm not sure I'm going to be able to manage. Can i really be bothered? Wouldnt it be easier just to disappear?

disappearing is a warm fantasy

seems very strange to me that some people don't get depressed

makes me wonder a lot about what makes someone susceptible really

Genetics, for one thing. Possibly for a lot of things.

~genetics~ is a kind of a hand wave

even when those mechanisms are better understood I still suspect that the sort of explanations offered will be incommensurable with any sort of first person experiential or psychological account

depression feels like such a thoroughly integrated part of people's personality that you need to account for it on the same terms you do with other facets

I'm sure completed neuroscience will make it all perfectly clear

i agree with you somewhat, ogmor, but that completely denies the existence of depression for those who have it for a limited amount of time
even if most of us in this thread are the other kind, that is, afflicted with the curse until death

In the broad context of my adult life as a whole, I'm currently doing great. Feeling steady and fine and generally happy, in a good relationship, things are relatively stable in my life, can't complain about much except the stupid job that I really need to move on from already. And yet I still think with a good deal of regularity, "I am fundamentally and irreparably damaged, and it really would be better for everyone if I weren't alive". I guess the only major difference from when I've been actively mired in depression is that those thoughts don't currently have the dreadful gravity that they've had at times in the past. But they never seem to go away completely. I guess I'm at least thankful that, from my present vantage, I can be all, "huh, what's that about?" But still.

In the same boat as you, Old Lunch. This has probably been the longest I've gone without backsliding deep into depression (it's been about six months now) but the thoughts never go away, they just become easier to ignore. In these good times, I am able to counter with opposing good thoughts. I also try to tell myself that when I inevitably fall back into the hole, that it will just be temporary (as it always has been), and that I can pull myself back out, but no amount of self-praise, plans, or good thoughts seems to get paid forward to the depressed times. In fact, I am still not sure how I've gotten out of the hole in the past.

Does anybody here with moderate to severe depression have to travel a lot for work? I'm getting so I can't stand it anymore...have to leave in two days and I'm totally immobilized by the prospect

When shit is bad I have a hard time convincing myself everyone doesn't secretly hate me, and hang out just out of pity.
I get sensitive; I get paranoid that people are shitting on me behind my back – even though my mom always told me 'you're too boring for other people to talk about.'
A little boy waves at me on my scooter and I start crying; I get mad that I read so many stupid Glass family novels. Is that what fucked me up? I feel like I am a bullshit.

I experience a lot of happiness but part of me is always ready to second-guess it unless I am drunk.

in the future when they complete neuroscience mb someone will be able to understand all the different hues we bracket under depression in some that vocabulary but I'm too much of an atheist to be comforted by the invocation of future omniscience & I don't think it wld be in terms that were meaningful. everyone's experience of depression is so individual, whether fleeting or long-lasting, reading about them they feel unfamiliar more often than familiar

in some that vocabulary

Today is a day of creeping existential dread. I spend so much time worrying about what I'm doing with my life that I end up hardly doing anything. I know I'd ought not compare myself to others, but I can't help but feel like such a loser sometimes--I'm in my late twenties and still have nothing that even approaches a "career." My old friends all seem to have found decent niches for themselves--teaching, web design stuff, music, etc. Some days I have this aspiration to be some kind of writer, and other days I feel like I want nothing more than to contribute just *some* thing of value to this planet but somehow it feels impossible for me to do so. I can't figure out what it would even mean. I don't want to live a life of mere existence and taking things from the world; I want to contribute, but it feels so often like I have nothing of value to contribute at all. I'll probably feel fine later, but I needed to vent somewhere.

That all sounds very familiar (except, y'know, late thirties with nothing resembling a career). I'm realizing that at some point in the not-so-distant past, I came to accept existential dread as a fact of, if not human existence, at least my own existence, and I used it as a starting point for rebuilding myself from a point in my life when I'd truly turfed out. Like, if I accept that everything is essentially devoid of meaning and human beings basically only exist to squirt out other human beings and to ultimately fertilize the earth...what then? It's been hard work, but I've found it incredibly helpful to reframe things such that the imprintation of meaning/value is and continues to be my own personal choice, realizing that I spend a lot of time beating myself up because I'm failing to live up to some imagined schematic that doesn't necessarily make sense to me and that I don't necessarily agree with. Yes, I'd love to find a path that feels meaningful to me personally, but it isn't helpful to allow some nebulous (and very likely imagined) aura of outside pressure to muddy the waters of what I personally value.

feeling this

http://gawker.com/winter-is-a-black-hole-how-i-deal-with-seasonal-depres-1652408745

http://thebaffler.com/salvos/endlessly-examined-life

reading that now, feelings of existential terror rising

Once I start crying there is a certain inertia to it, and it's very difficult to get it to stop. Fall asleep crying one day; wake up crying the next.

Not that it's necessarily what you're feeling, but that reminds me of this insightful part of Hyperbole and a half's post on depression (all of which is excellent and would make a good pamphlet for friends who can't wrap their minds around depression)

.... I rediscovered crying just before I got sick of hating things. I call this emotion "crying" and not "sadness" because that's all it really was. Just crying for the sake of crying. My brain had partially learned how to be sad again, but it took the feeling out for a joy ride before it had learned how to use the brakes or steer.

pretty much just want to be asleep all the time

tbh i am really good at it

#viking

good to see your sense of humor has not totally disappeared under a blanket of despair

sometimes it's an unidentifiable fear so intense you think it's going to kill you

but it never does!

true. but still feel horrible

i know that fear very well, it is dreadful.

Sometimes wonder if sleep apnoea is my brain attempting to commit suicide while I'm asleep.

Sorry but lol

I wonder how much quality of sleep tends to affect mental health, w/r/t stuff like apnea and light sleeping b/c of aches. How does it affect people and I wonder how it affects me in particular, what w/ my snoring/almost-apnea.

I think this week I will finally schedule throat support implants. Quick and easy. That just leaves my deviated septum, which sounds as horrible as my tonsillectomy (truly awful). Maybe sleep will be the cure of oversleeping.

I wonder how much quality of sleep tends to affect mental health

very very much

hard to say which is the chicken and the egg

in terms of causation maybe but i think it's reasonably well-documented now that inadequate sleep fucks with your mood, even if your mood was already low

the first 6 or so weeks after i was officially diagnosed with depression/anxiety and started celexa, i was also taking klonopin to sleep and holy shit i was getting such a great sleep every night - 6-7 hours of extremely restful sleep - that i thought i was actually cured. i had more energy and motivation than i've had in my entire life. i wanted to DO things, and go places and clean my house. it was the best i've ever felt in my life, but it's gone now and i'm just back to regular old me, which really sucks now that i've had an actual taste of the good life.

"Psychiatrists have long thought that depression causes insomnia, but new research suggests that insomnia can actually precede and contribute to causing depression. The causal link works in both directions."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/curing-insomnia-to-treat-depression.html

get yr sleeps if/when you can, frenz