The community here is growing and I couldn’t be more excited. After just two weeks of activity here on the blog we’ve passed over 1,300 hits and have gathered almost 100 followers. We’re all in this together. You are not alone and you are loved. For this post I thought I’d focus more on what it feels like as I gradually get more depressed. As I’m sure all too many people can relate to.

When I often describe that I’m in a low or slipping some people have a hard time understanding what I mean. These words usually have different meaning in every day use, but when I’m in a depressive state they are accurate descriptions of how I feel. It can start in a room full of people I know and love and will gradually feel myself start to slip. My senses start fading, my eyes get heavy, I feel like I’m moving backwards into myself. I slip. And in that feeling I find myself in that low. I feel reduced to nothing but my thoughts, and those thoughts themselves are useless. They’re meaningless, and they’re negative.

This will continue for a while until I almost feel reduced to apathy. Emotionless. Completely emotionless. And the sad thing is sometimes I’d rather be in this state. When I start feeling everything sometimes it becomes to much, and I’d rather be back in the state where I feel nothing at all. This is where sometimes something strange can happen. I feel like I’m watching myself. Outside of my own body.

This can be scary when it first occurs. You see yourself and aren’t really in control. Maybe you’re in the corner of the room watching, or maybe you’re floating above your own body. But what happens is you lose control of your reactions and your feelings. Everything becomes robotic and automated. I don’t feel genuine. I don’t feel like I’m me. I just watch myself live, except I’m not living at all.

And In the past I didn’t talk about it. Why? Because I thought I deserved the suffering. I thought I didn’t deserve happiness. But why shouldn’t I deserve happiness? What did I do that was so wrong? I couldn’t tell you. But I could tell you that I felt like an awful person. And that awful person that I was didn’t deserve to be happy.

But there was only one part of me that didn’t want to be happy. The side that was depressed. Not the side that was confident, happy, funny, and out going. Because so much of the time I feel like two different people. But thats the thing. I’m not two different people. There are multiple parts of me, as there are with anyone else. The reality is, in the end, I’m two sides of the same coin. And by not accepting the two sides of that same coin, I’m ultimately fighting myself. And I’ll never have peace.

Realizing these things have helped me make progress, and if you’re going through the same things know that you can do it, you’re not alone, and you are loved.

PF