Sadness

Source: Deviant Art user aoao2

I am sad. I am so sad. I am trying to accomplish things but sadness interferes. I want to write but sadness means all the topics I can think of are sad and will only make me feel worse. I want to clean my apartment but I’m overwhelmed with hopelessness and self-loathing. I want to feel anything but the gnawing emptiness and despair inside me. 

I want to be “better” than this. I want to not let my depression “get to me”. I want to think happy thoughts and have happy feelings, but they are trapped behind glass too thick for me to break.

I want to be proactive in my health care. I want to get a therapist and a general practitioner and a psychiatrist who can prescribe me the antidepressants I clearly need. But even look up a phone number sends me into a panic. Making a call takes days of preparation and days of recovery time after.

It’s hard not to feel pathetic. Wasn’t I capable of cleaning my home just last month? Didn’t I make a scary phone call just last week? Yet now nothing seems within my capabilities.

Living with depression is like living with an abusive roommate who never pays rent and refuses to leave. Depression is the squatter in my brain, poisoning everything good in my life and isolating me in unhealthy ways.

So here I am, trying. Here I am fighting back. I’m writing something I’m convinced is utter garbage, because at least I can check something off my to-do list and feel slightly less pathetic. After this I’ll spend half an hour cleaning and then an hour praising myself for the effort. I will feed myself and put myself to bed at a reasonable hour. I will TRY. In the midst of a depression episode, trying is the very best I can do. So I will. No matter how useless it feels.