It’s no secret that I suffer from depression and that I’m on medication for it. I don’t tend to talk about it much because it’s not something I choose to focus on, other that taking daily measures (no pun intended) to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. It’s part of who I am, and I’m not ashamed of it. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t suck though.
Not even in the general manner where when you’re depressed, everything sucks. Because a lot of the time, even when I find myself down in a valley, I still don’t have a generalized “life as a whole sucks a giant rock” attitude. I dated a guy once who suffered such crippling depression that he couldn’t get out of bed some days. Ultimately it was his depression that was the death of our relationship- he stopped caring about anything other than being depressed, and just sort of drifted away.
Most of the time when I get depressed I just start to feel very very alone, even if I’m not. I think that that’s a lot of why my singleness hits me so hard a lot of the time- because there’s usually a touch of depression lurking under my surface, even when I’m happy, and it doesn’t always take a lot to trigger it. Oddly, reading about the happiness of others triggers it. That seems counterintuitive to me, when others are happy it should make me happy. Instead it reminds me of the things I long for, and makes me sad. I hate that. I really, really fucking hate that.
I’m not sure if there is a point to what I’m trying to say here. I’m not trying to be a drama queen, I’m not trying to say poor me, everyone has what I want but me. In general, I’m pretty happy with my life, my life is good. I have people I care about, who care about me. There are things that I want- a relationship, a marriage, children, the picket fence and the dog. But deep inside, in the most honest part of myself, I know I’m not ready for that. There is growing I need to do and there are things I need to learn and habits I need to change. Just because I know those things, it doesn’t make the wanting go away, and it doesn’t make not having them hurt any less, because you can’t reason with your emotions.