fuck. (a really tedious rant about my mental health)
It's been kind of obvious if you've been anywhere near me in these last few months, but I think depression is catching up to me again. It's nothing new, I've been there before. There was a year-long stretch of my life not too long ago that I spent locked in my house, not even going outside for uni. I got over it and, even though some part of me always knew it could come back eventually, I always told myself that if I've gotten over it once, I can do it again. Seemed logical in theory. Well, it came back, but it's not quite the same.
That time, what made me isolate myself was feelings of inadequacy. I won't bore you, but suffice it to say that the post-COVID collapse of my entire social and romantic life, my plummeting academic performance and some childish preconceptions about life that I'd gotten from spending too much time in the wrong corners of the internet came together to form a sort of perfect storm. Much of my time was spent at home commiserating and distracting myself with various flavors of slop. This isn't what's happening this time. This time my primary motivator for my impulse to isolate myself is disgust.
I am disgusted by a world that is relentlessly trying to annihilate me and everyone I love for… no reason, really. I am disgusted by a general public that is either uncaring or actively seeking out scapegoats because they know that those responsible will never pay for what they did. I am disgusted by an omnipresent cultural push towards apathy, "getting that bag" and painting anyone who gives a shit about anything as some kind of delusional deviant. I am disgusted by the people who know full well that they're complicit with the fucking demons stripping society for parts, but are fine with it because they can say slurs at work now. I am, above all, disgusted with myself for allowing myself to feel this way about people who are ultimately the same as me.
I used to be so much more than this. For a brief time in my life, I used to be a person capable of feeling the full spectrum of human emotions. I used to be capable of harnessing them to create things that, while not the best, still felt valuable. Human. These days, all I ever feel is anger. All I ever do is sit by myself, stewing in impotent cuck rage as the world crumbles around me. On top of all the other things I was robbed of, I think they took away a piece of my soul. Maybe, in better times, it will come back. Maybe something else will grow in its place. But, until then, I'll never know. Until then, all I'll have is a gaping wound where that part of me used to be and the creeping fear that its scarring will leave me incomplete forever.
I thought I was doing well, you know? Yes, my situation was still far from perfect, but I was leaps and bounds ahead of where I was last time. Didn't matter. You can do all the work, push yourself every step of the way there and sometimes you'll just get hit by a car regardless. Due to circumstances far outside of my control, I am once again a recluse. I am once again someone who can't look a person in the eyes with anything other than spite. I'm trying to fight it, but what am I supposed to do when the thing driving this change for the worse is an entirely rational response to the circumstances I'm in? Should I just do what everyone else does and pretend it's not happening while I jerk off to AI porn and stuff my face with matcha-flavored dubai chocolate or whatever the fuck it is they do these days? If there truly is nothing more to life these days, just let me die.
You know, I've tried exposure therapy. Putting myself out there more, trying to meet new people, because surely they can't all be awful. Had to stop. Not because everyone is awful, but because the sheer volume of people who are was making me entrench myself further in my misanthropic beliefs. I don't doubt that there are decent people out there, even in the backwards shithole I live in, but the reality of it is that you have to surround yourself with an excuciating amount of bigots and lobotomites in order to get to them and, if I can be real with you, I just don't have it in me. Especially when I know that whenever I think I've found someone I genuinely respect, 9 times out of 10 they'll turn around and do something that will make me think of them as the lowest of worms. I've been let down so many times and, at this point, I think all I've accomplished by trying is to somehow make myself worse and more spiteful.
Don't misunderstand me. These are wrong things to think. It is neither realistic nor healthy to think of your fellow man like this. I know that, to a rather large extent, the problem here is me. That's why I try so hard to steer myself away from that line of thinking, but so far nothing has worked. Unfortunately, if getting rid of dysfunctional thought patterns was as easy as becoming aware that they're dysfunctional, no one would ever struggle with their mental health. I'm at an impasse where I know exactly what the problem is, but I just don't know what to do with myself. I can feel I'm getting worse, both mentally and as a person, and I don't really know how to stop it. If it was just a me thing, I could solve it through self-improvement, as I have done in the past, but right now, even if I were a perfect being with no flaws, the world would still be shit and I would still feel pretty bad about it.
I'm not alone. I have people who care about me, both here and elsewhere. Unfortunately, they are also the people bearing the brunt of this shit. I'm way more irritable than normal and it has made me act in ways that are frankly fucking embarassing. I'm tired all the time so I never do shit for them. A lot of things that used to bring me joy just don't anymore, so there is nowhere for all of this accumulated tension to go. I blow up at the slightest inconvenience and all I really want to do right now is just lie down and be by myself for a really long time. I'm acting like a petulant child and the worst part is that I'm painfully aware of it at all times. I'll get over it eventually. I did it once, I can do it again. But in the meantime, the gap between the person I am and the person I want to be grows larger by the day.