If you need me

[yo man im awesome]

This is a lot all at once. I apologize in advance.

This is probably going to jump around a lot. Thoughts are jumbled and incomplete, and mine are no exception. I’m writing as I think, because that’s the only way I could possibly articulate everything I’m about to write the way I want it to come out. This is the first anyone is seeing of this. Maybe 2 people at most are even remotely aware of anything wrong, and they really have no idea. I wish I could simply talk about this first, but I’ve gathered at this point that I’m never going to be able to simply *talk* about this, so I’ve written it down instead, because that’s apparently easier to me.

I am severely depressed.

To be clear before all of this: I am not suicidal. That may be one of the few things I have direct control over. Of course I’ve thought about the idea, but it has never been considered a legitimate or feasible option, and I would never put myself or anyone else through that pain. Ever.

I’ve been putting this off for an extremely long time, probably upwards of 3 or 4 years at this point.

I’m slowly coming to grips with the fact that I have little to no control. That said, I’m sitting here hating that fact, because I feel like I should have more control than this. Everything about me is one giant contradiction, where I don’t (or can’t?) practice what I preach. I feel like I’ve completely lost touch with reality, and while I spend each and every day acknowledging that, I lie to myself and everyone I see and walk around like nothing’s wrong.

I think I’ve found that one of my most prevalent issues is my lack of handle on delayed gratification. Not even just for myself, but for other people. Motivation has reached appallingly low levels, and where I used to be able to act under extreme stress and time constraints, less and less often is that holding true. I put things off (and I lie about it) – tasks, requests, obligations, actual necessities – out of some cruel combination of laziness, lack of motivation, and fear of disappointment. I am legitimately terrified of telling somebody that I didn’t do X, or that I didn’t do well on Y. The obvious solution of course, would be to simply do what I need to do to make those things happen, and to prevent poor showings from occurring. I am fully aware of this, and even with that, I can’t even begin to get myself to start. My body and mind would rather lie to your face and tell you things are fine than tell you the truth and get it done later, or just straight up get it done on time.

When, for example, it’s crunch time for an assignment, especially bigger ones like essays, I used to wake up (or stay up) until extremely late hours, after spending the entire day telling myself “I’ll do this in a little bit/After this I’ll do it/Later”, cry to myself for however long it took me to get my sorry ass up, and then go do the assignment until I was either done or incapable of continuing from exhaustion. Now, I’ll occasionally get up and do the smaller assignments and just wallow in my own self-pity in my head, given that I have a roommate. For the larger assignments, I will go through the whole process, but at the end I don’t even start anymore. I’ll give myself a “oh it’s way too late to start this/there’s no point now/it’s probably not worth that much/I’ll just do the next one” and try to not psyche myself out of sleeping so I can at least present myself to everyone I see tomorrow, so I can do myself up and present myself non-suspiciously to everyone around me and I can get away with lying that I did X or Y and that I feel great.

Honestly, when someone asks me how I am in regular conversation, I could probably argue that I’m not actually lying when I tell them that I feel good. I’ve become so horrifyingly capable at completely and totally dissociating myself from my problems that I think I’m starting to dissociate myself from my own reality – that nothing really is wrong and I can go do what I please, wasting my time, wasting everyone’s time, wasting my family’s money, wasting their patience. I can distract myself so easily from my problems, with almost no effort. I have this disgusting apathy and I hate it.

I’ve had a problem with biting my nails, lips, and fingers my entire life. As a kid, I couldn’t really say why I did it – my current guess is that I suffer from some minor form of Excoriation Disorder or Dermatophagia (The compulsion to bite/pick at one’s skin) because today I can equate it to something like substance abuse. I am aware of it and its problems, and yet I do it both consciously and unconsciously, as if there’s something relaxing about me destroying my body. That said I’m not so foolish as to self-diagnose myself and call it truth or fact, this is entirely off of my own speculation. I’ve started to find that under stress or anxiety of any kind I tend to do it more often unconsciously. I don’t think that this habit or disorder happened because of stress or anxiety, being that it started when I was little, but stress and anxiety have certainly perpetuated it. It may also be that I have not done any “standard” self-harm to myself, because of this. This may currently serve the same purpose without me really being aware.

I care about a lot of people, and there a lot of people who care about me. They may be my family, my friends, neighbors, whoever. I feel like I’ve painted a different picture of myself to possibly each and every one of you, so much so that if you asked me to give you the “real me”, I couldn’t give it to you. I literally don’t know how to properly describe my actual self; I don’t know how the “real me” would act. Somewhere, someone I know may very well know the real me, and I honestly, truly, wouldn’t know whether that is or some other modified self I gave to someone else. All these images I’ve presented myself as, to everyone, has been done, again, out of this intense fear of disappointment and lack of grasp on delayed gratification. I rarely start my own conversations, I’ll hope and pray someone starts one with me, and when they do, I’ll do everything I can to make this person want to continue talking to me, to the point where I’ll lie about knowledge of his topic so he can continue eagerly, when I could simply say that I don’t know, but that I’m still interested. Someone could ask me about an artist or album I’ve never heard before and I’ll give some lame generalities and inferences based off of small points they’ve made so I can pretend like I know, because it makes or builds a connection to them.

These same people likely have set their own level of expectations for and of me, with most of those expectations usually being perfectly reasonable. For whatever stupid reason I can’t handle these simple expectations like “do well in school” “go to class” “practice your instrument” “listen to this” “read this” “talk to him/her”. I manage to crumble under simple expectations that are more or less standard to everybody, and that very disappointment that I hate and fear is creeping closer and closer to being unavoidable but on a much larger scale. Frankly I crumble harder not because of the expectations themselves, but because I know they’re so easily manageable and yet I’m watching everything escape myself. I feel bad for everybody else that they have deal with me lagging behind and getting away with it with some dumb luck or unbelievable generosity from someone else.

I find myself constantly feeling completely alone. I’m unreasonably afraid to talk to people in general, and to talk to people about my problems, out of some unfounded fear of rejection. I feel like people turn around to things like this because they don’t know how to help, which, first of all, not knowing how to help is understandable. I know it isn’t true either, especially with my friends; I’m aware that most if not all of them would be more than willing to help me through with whatever they could. Yet that fear doesn’t go away. It won’t go away.

Alternatively, thinking about it, I feel like there might be almost this fear of sympathy. I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s like, I don’t want people to feel bad for me, because I don’t think that they should need to. They shouldn’t have to deal with my problems, they shouldn’t have to feel bad for me, so when people do I appreciate it, but I can’t help but feel worse for it.

I feel like I’m aware of the simple, straightforward answers to all my problems, and I’m aware of how baseless and unwarranted all my fears are, but they don’t go away, they stay and push and push until they’re all that’s there. I feel worse knowing that I’m wrong and that I’m doing nothing to deal with it or make it better.

The “pictures” I’ve presented myself as to different people; I’m worried that I can’t talk to anybody as genuinely as I could be because I’m hardly genuine to myself. How am I supposed to take other people seriously when I can’t even begin to do that with myself? I don’t like things about myself – I don’t even like my own voice – and I have to act like I do to everyone around me.

One of the worst parts of all this is that I have nothing to be depressed about. I’m an unbelievably lucky person, living in a more than adequate income home, with a family unrivaled in compassion and strength. I somehow got away with getting into Stony Brook University, a frankly phenomenal institution. I have a web of beautiful people who care about and love me, who I’m lucky enough to call my friends. I’m lucky with my ability to understand concepts in class (when I go, or when I’m paying attention). Even with everything, with all of that, my body and my mind reject themselves as terrible and irredeemable, to the point where writing all this feels, for lack of a better word, pretentious.

The clear and direct solution to most, if not all of my problems, should simply just be to talk about it. It’s taken me more than 4 years to even remotely consider even bringing up the topic. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to anybody about this. It’s not a lack of trust in anyone, I think. I think it may be that this stigma of depression not being a real or serious issue is still in my head. Not society’s stigma, but my own. I think I’ve put it into my own head that nothing is wrong and I should just be able to get over myself, and it’s my own fault for not doing it already. On top of that, I just don’t want to put anyone else through my own problems. No one else should have to deal with my baggage. This is of course completely hypocritical, given that I constantly and actively try to be the person that people talk to about their problems, and I actively try and get people to be vocal about their problems to begin with, because they shouldn’t have to hold everything in. I feel like everyone already has enough to deal with, and I think that the façade I’ve given myself as to everyone is (hopefully) seen as some sort of positive figure, and I don’t want people to have another negative in their life of me being depressed and having to deal with all of my problems. Hell, I literally didn’t talk to anybody, I just started writing this because I know there was no chance of me bringing this up to anybody in conversation. My university offers unbelievable support for things like this and aware of that, I still can't bring myself to go.

I’ve hidden everything from everyone. No one’s known that I’ve literally cried myself to sleep. No one’s known that I’ve stayed in my car after getting home late for half an hour because at night it’s one of the only places I’ve found actual privacy to fall apart on myself. No one’s known that I actually struggle to get out of bed because I don’t want to deal with whatever disappointment I could be bringing people that day. It’s this spiraling void of not wanting to disappoint people, but then immediately doing the exact thing that disappoints them knowing full well that that’s what’s going to happen. The saddest part is that I had to write this up like this. My dad is probably going to learn secondhand from someone else mentioning this post to him, because I can’t bear bringing this up myself to him. He’s been put through so much already, and to put him through another gauntlet of stress is just too hard. I trust him more than I do anybody else, and I can’t even talk to him. I hate that I can’t, because it’s not his fault, and his first instinct is probably going to be that he thinks that he doesn’t seem trustworthy to me. How is somebody supposed to do that?

I actually feel like I’ve just wasted everybody’s time. I’ve wasted my time, I’ve wasted my family’s time, I’ve wasted some of my friend’s time. I’ve wasted money, mine and other’s. It's taken years just to be able to essentially tell people that I’m sad and I don’t know what to do about it. Everything just feels heavy. My head, my eyes, my arms, everything. I really, honestly, don’t know what to do about it.

I’m actually a little surprised that I can’t think of anything else to write. There is 100% more, but I think this is the large majority of what needed to be said. Sorry for pretty much everything, I’ve wasted a bunch of people’s time. No one should think they had any influence on me being depressed, be it through their expectations of me, their humor, or something else. If I laugh with you, I laugh because I want to, it’s not forced. I appreciate and love each and every person I know and interact with every day, I probably wouldn’t have gotten very far without most of you. Every conversation I’ve ever had, more or less, has been with the intention to build relationships and to make them happy. In the end I just want to make everyone happy, so they don’t have to be like me. Everyone, I think, has treated me in kind, and that’s something I really can’t thank enough. This was something no one should ever have to read or write, but here we are. If you actually went through all of this, thank you.

This is a place I don't visit nearly as often as I used to, but it and it's community are like a second home to me. I haven't placed this anywhere else yet and I haven't talked to anybody yet, so this is quite literally the first time anyone is seeing this.

I might not answer right away if you try and get in touch with me. But if you do I will if I can. Most of you already have somewhere to find me.