Listen, Life is Friggin’ Hard

Really hard. If it isn’t, maybe you’re not doing it right? That’s not meant as a judgement so much as a questioning of whether you are doing the work of life or just gliding by on the surface. Do you read the book or just admire the cover and skim the blurbs? 3/5/2021

I started this post way back on March 5th. At that point, I was just over a month or so into my latest deep bout of depression. When I started writing this—as you can probably tell from the initial (short) paragraph that I’ve chosen to let stand—it was with an eye toward helping draw myself back up from the depths as much as it was to impart some first-hand perspective to my fellow warriors out there in the world.

Trying to look back, perhaps I was actually much further into it than a month. I was crying and feeling pretty hopeless way back in October maybe—November for sure. I don’t know. Everything tends to morph into a big ol’ disorganized blur. Time loses all meaning. I don’t know what day of the week it is, what month it is even sometimes.

The entire past two years have been a death-defying roller coaster ride the likes of which I would never wish upon anyone. Though there were a couple of months mixed in there where it seemed like I was coming back up and I’d resumed taking my vitamins, restarted some meds, started exercising and dieting, though I quickly fell back down.

Anyway, all this to get to admitting here that I’m in it pretty deep and struggling daily to come up with a reason, any reason, to keep on living. The thing of it is, with all these swirling hateful, hopeless feelings it is so much harder to find reasons. Even with all of that, I know that dying is not really what I want—I just want it to stop, all of it. The constant barrage of pain and despair, the tears, the lack of motivation and vision, the headaches, the resultant dehydration—it’s such a vicious cycle of crap. I just want it to stop and let me be normal.

But normal isn’t something real and attainable either.

So in the midst of yet another crying jag today I hit up Google with “how to find reasons to live.” Now, I’m a bit of a Reddit newb (and maybe that term dates me, who knows, I’ve been around a while…) but I find Google sends me there quite often. Today’s link led to this wonderfully written piece/explanation that the poster credited to /u/ImportantPotato:

"Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation.

"If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.

"It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself.

"Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged."

As I said, life is hard. Really hard. On a somewhat “good” day though, it is hopeful to finally see so much attention being given to mental health, though still quite a shame what it’s taken to get that conversation rolling.

Sending you love and support