I find writing a cathartic release. When I drop into moments of depression, or I begin feeling that something isn’t quite right, I find that I can open up an empty document, and mentally dump everything out onto the page. Sometimes this reveals things about myself, and my psyche that I wasn’t aware of at the time. Sometimes it’s just the experience of actually facing my issues that helps me get over them.
Recently I’ve been feeling increasingly more depressed and I slammed hard into the bottom of that depression the other day. I initially thought that it was caused by one singular incident, but on further reflection I realise that isn’t truly the case. It was simply the final, fatal, crack in a veneer I had created around myself. With that realisation I uncovered a few things about myself, the most important being:
I can’t remember when I was last genuinely happy.
That statement can be read many ways. What I mean by it is that I simply don’t remember when happiness was my underlying, base emotion. We all have happy moments in life, but for me they seem to have become bright sparks in the fog of everyday life. Those moments are becoming more difficult to achieve, and when I do find them, that feeling never lasts as long as it used to. I walk around numb and completely indifferent at best, and my worst is no fun for anyone around me. There are things I’ve been doing for so long now that I forgot that they’re not healthy. I struggle to sleep almost every night, though when I do manage to I don’t want to get out of bed in the morning. When I wake up, and at random points throughout the day, I’ll notice my jaw hurts because I’ve been clenching it tightly for a while, and then even when I notice I still struggle to unclench it.
I realised that over the last few years I’ve been building this veneer of happiness around myself in an effort to hide my true emotional state from everyone. Then as time wore on the veneer would crack. I’d struggle briefly, and then somehow hold that lie together, and to everyone else I would appear as normal again. If the cracks grew too wide, I would contribute it to a bad day, or having too much to drink. Then I’d carry on hiding myself in plain sight.
I can’t stand the job, or the industry I work in anymore. I lost all passion for it so long ago that the thought of going into the office, any office, to continue doing it fills me with more despair than I can truly articulate. This doesn’t have anything to do with my current employers, whom I actually like and have been pretty good to me, but simply the industry I work in, and the issues that come with it. The cracks on the veneer I hold around myself are continually caused by this. I continue to do the job because the next major issue in my life is money. I lived very recklessly in my twenties, and because of that I’ve accumulated a lot of debt.
Debt that has grown more damaging to me over the years than I’ve ever really told anyone. I make all the repayments I have to, but there never seems to be any real headway made with it. I constantly seem to be stuck in the mud when it comes to clearing it all. I found myself in the sticky situation of having high credit card debt, and then taking out a loan to clear the card. That sounds reasonable, until you realise that my spending habits hadn’t changed, and I was still as irresponsible with my money as I’d always been, which meant that the credit card debt increased again, leaving me with the credit card, and the loan to deal with, all of which spiralled over the years. I’m slowly chipping away at it all,and it’s much better than it was, but while work is a big contributor to my unhappiness, this situation tops that by a long way. It’s what keeps me awake at night when I can’t figure out how I’m going to deal with it all. I’m not going to give you a figure, but let’s just say it’s a lot.
These two things combined are enough to make anyone unhappy, and I was willing to leave my introspection at those two points, but I knew that there is more going on in my mind, that are just as dangerous to my well being if I don’t deal with them.
Digging deeper highlighted a fundamental problem I have. One that grew worse after creating this veneer around myself. That problem is that I feel completely disconnected from everyone, my friends included. I have is an inner circle of friends that I love, but in truth I have so very little in common with them that it can be difficult to share anything. That caused me to hold all of my major problems internally, create the lie that I was fine, and then try to hold everything together. As solutions to problems go, that isn’t even a good short term one, yet it’s what I’ve been doing for so long now that I can’t remember another way to manage them.
This disconnect fills every part of my life just now. The more I held that veneer of happiness around myself the more disconnected I felt. I’ve become so indifferent to almost everyone around me that I find it hard to truly care about anything. I think this lack of feeling has grown because if I cared about anything enough, the veneer will slip and then the doubts, fears, and raw unhappiness I’ve held in for so long will finally be allowed to see the light of day, and I had no idea how that would affect me.
Then something happened. As these stories tend to go, I met a girl. We connected almost instantly, and for the first time in such a long time, I felt really comfortable around someone. We were having a lot of fun, and we really enjoyed each others company. Then it ended.
I take full responsibility for that. We hadn’t known each other that long, but things moved too fast, adding lots of extra pressure that should never have been there. I’d let someone past my guard, and when I could feel everything slipping away I tried to grab onto it tighter. Which as you can imagine made everything worse. I realise now, I was trying to use that relationship to repair my completely damaged psyche, which is unfair to her, completely unrealistic, and quite frankly stupid on more levels than I can think of right now. It damaged a friendship with her that I hope I can repair, because while I realise that I do really like her, there was never a long term future there. What I saw in that brief relationship was the memory of being happy and I tried to grasp something that wasn’t really there.
There had been warning signs that I was losing my control, although I didn’t comprehend that was what was actually happening at the time. But when I truly realised that it was over, and it had never really begun, the cracks came too quickly. I tried to hold it all together, but the strain of doing so was just too much. I managed to hold it together for a while, but it was obvious my mood was growing darker, and worse. Then, under that strain I buckled. It was not pretty.
It has made me realise something, that should be fairly obvious. Life is too short to be this unhappy. Instead of just holding all this bleakness inside me, I need to find ways to dispel it. I need to stop pretending everything is fine, and actually do something to make myself happy again. I have no idea what that will be or how to go about doing it, but the first step had to be acknowledging the problem. For the moment, that veneer is back in place. Not because I want it there, but because it’s still essential in getting me through the day. I understand it a lot better now though, and because of that I no longer have to wrap it so tightly around myself. That will ease the pressure it causes, and lead me towards a means to remove it completely. At least that is my hope.
I debated the decision to post this here or to leave it offline. In the end I decided that it was something I needed to share, even if I didn’t really want to. Instead of hiding it away again I want this moment of clarity to mark the beginning of this journey. I want to be able to look back on this and see the path I walked to get from this point, to the day I let the veneer fall away completely and never have to worry about it again. I really hope that day isn’t too far in the future.
