Some Thoughts On Depression

This may be a little dark, I wrote it to try and explore my thoughts on a particularly bad day.

I still don't really know what depression is. I mean, I know what it is but I just don't know how or why it managed to creep up on me. I thought I was just lazy, initially. When my boyfriend left for work in the morning I'd just lay in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. It felt like I was punishing myself for not wanting to get up and do anything, by refusing to let myself enjoy not doing anything. I'd let myself get stuck in the guilty cycle of the procrastinator- not being able to let go of the thing you should be doing so your procrastination becomes guilty and impossible to enjoy.  I used to be able to drag myself out of that at the last minute and get my work done. It was always sloppy and I'd resent myself for not living up to my potential, but at least it'd be done and I could breathe for a little while. And then, one day, I started to let the deadlines come and go. I knew I probably wouldn't hand assignments in so I stopped picking them up. I let my record pick up zero after zero, and still I felt like it didn't matter. Who would notice? It's not like a friendly school teacher was going to pull me aside and say "I noticed you haven't been doing your work lately, is everything alright at home? Do you need some help?" And that's the thing, it was only me that was responsible for my failure.

I just wanted desperately for someone to see through my facade, to see that I did care deep down. I still don't know if anything would have pulled me out of that spiral of indifference, but it would involve people, I know that much. I feel like if someone, anyone, had looked me right in the eye and asked "Are you okay? You've not been yourself recently" then I would have broken down completely. I would have fallen to the floor and wailed as if everyone most important to me had died. Because I had lost a part of myself. I'd lost the quiet, geeky girl who loved to learn. She wanted to invent something important, to make the world a better place. Instead she'd found that physics was just an unfeeling string of numbers, and she herself was just an ID number in a computer system, only given value by how high her own numbers were. Her teachers and her parents had let her believe that she could do anything she wanted, that she was capable of anything.

The academic slump when you realise that compared to everyone around you're just mediocre really hurts. Maybe I just took it harder than most? I think I'd let it become too much a part of who I was. Maybe I'll find that lost girl some day, when I've sifted through my box of thoughts and pieced myself together again.

I think I'd better stop writing for now.