An Open Letter

I remember a few nights ago snapchat gave me yet another notification about a memory from 7 years ago. For some reason I decided to click on it, and clicked a few through and ended up seeing a picture of me freshman year in high school; I was smiling super bright as I was covered in rain. The weirdest part is I didn’t recognize that it was me. One of the bad parts of depression is how much it affects my memory, to the point if I think about things in the past I can only recall about 10 or so things that have happened. The most fresh one was me laying down in the road at night in Australia hoping a car would hit me, from 3 years ago.

While I was biking over to the library to meet some friends, I realized how bad insecurity had gotten: I knew anxiety was wreaking havoc in my mind telling me that my friends are trying to replace me and they don’t like me, but I realized it had gotten bad enough as I was apathetic again. I know I am supposed to be sad, or panicking, but now all I feel is nothing. There’s no pain, no happiness, no sadness, no nothing. Just biking through the Pardall tunnel seeing a beautiful sky and feeling nothing.

The description of depression I like the most is as follows: imagine you get faced with something bad. Your brain thinks that bad thing is TOO much to handle for you, and so it fully hides it from you to make sure it can’t hurt you. But because of that you don’t know what is wrong, but suddenly your mood and overall function just drastically nosedive. It’s a fairly flawed plan, as its the worst of both worlds: on one hand you start feeling like shit with no pleasure at all, but on the other hand you don’t even know what is wrong so you could try to fix it.

Now I’m in that awkward middle ground of trying to solve a problem with no feedback if it is even the thing that is hurting me. I guess as a side result I’ve gotten good academics, decent at video games, and a desire to be a better person?

I don’t know which one I’d choose if I had a choice.