I know a lot of people think I overshare and probably think I’m an attention seeking butthole but I don’t care because I can’t care, either love me anyway or don’t, but I’m really struggling in this moment and need to put it out somewhere. I’m in one of those existential depressed mindsets where I feel no motivation for anything and can’t find meaning in anything and I keep sitting here scrolling through Facebook and I’m getting no sense of connection from it, in fact it’s making me feel increasingly isolated, but I keep scrolling anyway, hoping… and I would post this there but sometimes Facebook feels like a friend or relative’s home where I’ve overstayed my welcome and anyway no one wants to read that shit, so instead the void threatens to swallow me whole. I wish I could figure out how to move forward as a fucking human being.
If I could cry or scream that would be cool but it’s not that kind of thing. It’s more like a restless nothingness. Later I’m going to feel embarrassed and ashamed for sharing this but sharing is all I have and I don’t have the energy to care about feeling embarrassed right now. I don’t want your advice. The other day I went to a doctor because I was having daily awful headaches, and you know what he told me, he told me to take Tylenol for my fucking headache as if I’d never thought of that, the smug bastard, and I think he actually thought he was being helpful. I know all the things I’m supposed to do. Don’t recommend them to me. I will ask for advice when I want it and right now all I want is understanding and listening and for people not to roll their eyes at me or talk about how I shouldn’t share so much or try to fix it for me or write me off as a lost cause or say I should just smile or that I have nothing to be depressed about.
I’ve heard people close to me who do not deal with depression on a daily fucking basis say that the thing about depression is that depressed people are so self-consumed. Maybe so. I would challenge you to not be self-consumed when you can barely muster the energy to move your body AT ALL, but while I may be self-consumed I am also consumed with everything. I am at war with pain and suffering and injustice and the vast, encompassing dark. I also contain love and triumph and wonder and joy and the warmth of light, because those things are also in there.
It is that everything that keeps pulling me back into the hole, each time I think I can make it out. It is the everything that swirls around within, the everything, which is almost the same as the nothing from The Never-Ending Story, that growing dread and darkness, destroying all along its path, and try as I might to run from it I know I can’t escape it, because it is me.
The difference is that the everything contains hope and light and beauty, where the nothing does not. At this point I’m just throwing around Never-Ending Story metaphors but goddamn it I don’t want to be Atreyu’s horse (Artax), I don’t want to let the power of despair pull me under. I am the everything, which is almost the same as the nothing except that while the everything pulls me under, it will allow me to rise again.