My story
Fighting with myself
For quite a while now I’ve been severely depressed, yet no one has known quite how bad it is.
A few of my friends have been really good to me, and I feel like I can talk to them, but they have their own lives and when I talk to them about my troubles I feel like I’m upsetting them or creating a burden.
My other friends think I’m just as happy as ever and that if they ignore me when I’m upset that it’ll get better on it’s own.
My family feel the same way, which leaves me being so alone.
I’ve been to doctors before, but I started anti-depressants last week and since then it has got me thinking ‘do I actually want to get better?’ I know that that sounds really bad because well, I’m suffering, everyone here is suffering from this illness. But I feel like I’ve altered between being hurt, numb, depressed for so long that I don’t know what happiness would even be like?
If I didn’t feel like this any longer would I still be me? I can’t even imagine it.
I sort of see happiness as fake, a lot of people can generally be happy. But I can know longer see a future ahead of me, I don’t see myself happy with kids or friends or anything I used to see. IT’s all black.
If I were to live I can see me being just as miserable but in an older form.
I guess my question for everyone is: Is happiness real? & How does it actually feel?
It’s not that I don’t think I’m strong enough to survive, it’s more a question of whether I want to. I’ve lost hope.
Laura
January 27, 2012
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Hi Laura,
Your expectations of the future, and the thoughts that color your impression of the future in your mind, are all based on the way you feel in the present. If you feel depressed now, you will likely see your future as a depressing place. If you are happy now, you will see your future as a happy place. The only time that exists is the present, the future does not exist nor does the past. Only now, everything is crammed into this one moment. So, if we are to feel better about the “future”, at least in the way our mind perceives it to exist, then we must work on the way we think/feel/act now.
It is actually normal asking the questions you are asking, given the way you have been feeling for a while now: is a “happy” me still me? How would I cope if I weren’t feeling this way? Happiness is fake! Is happiness real? When I was depressed and anxious for a period of time, I started asking myself the same questions. Actually, I clung to the anxiety/depression as if I needed it, as if it were part of me. Then I deeply realized that it was not part of me at all, it was something that was obscuring the real world around me, so I had to let it go. IT took time, but in time its hold on me got weaker and weaker, and I understood it better and better, and that was that.
I would highly recommend you go and speak with a counselor or psychologist to help you with getting a grip on this. You need to fundamentally change the way you see yourself and your life, and the world around you. Right now, you are seeing it through the filter of someone who is depressed. This is not the real world, this is the wool being pulled over your eyes. The world has no true nature, not happy nor depressed. It just is what it is, we color our own world.
You can also do things such as eat a very healthy diet, learn what depression actually is on the physiological level and how it ties into the psychological level, exercise, spend 30mins per day laughing (I kid you not, it will change the way your brain functions and thus your moods/outlook). Many things can be done to supplement your medication and counseling.
You are not abnormal, all of the things you point out I’ve personally experienced and made a 100% recovery. You can too. I wish you the best come back and chat anytime.
Steve