Depression and Anxiety: When You Face the Darkness

I was born with depression and anxiety. This isn’t something that came from a trauma or a learned behavior or coping mechanism. This is something that as far back as I can remember was always a part of me. There was always a slight grey to every color, a disconnect with other people. A desire to be alone.

I’m not saying being alone is a bad thing. Feeling more comfortable alone is some peoples jam. I get that. There is being alone, and being lonely. I was lonely. Even in a crowd, I felt alone. Celebrating my birthday with friends; lonely. It wasn’t like I was going off on my own to avoid people. I was alone with people. I naturally began to seek out being alone with my loneliness. It was as if there was something inside me wanting to isolate me. Feelings turned into stories I would hear myself tell as to why I was better off alone. There were times I would cry myself to sleep, knowing I was to be alone and lonely forever. When the isolation takes place, socializing becomes difficult. They’re just using you. They don’t understand. They have it easy. Don’t they know how hard it is for you? Don’t they care? Every moment with a group of people, even friends and relatives becomes torture, waiting for the moment when you can finally go back to a room by yourself.

Isolation is one thing. The other is feelings. It is often that people say they “feel depressed”. You can feel depressed and not have depression. That’s normal. But depression is not “feeling depressed”. It is having your feelings be depressed. As in you can’t really feel anything. The isolation gets so great you are even isolated from yourself. It’s one thing to feel sad when you know you should be happy. It’s something completely different when you have no feeling at all when you should be feeling something. Happy, sad, angry. Anything. Depression comes across as sadness, but often it is more of a lack of feeling than too much of a feeling. Maybe this is just my type of depression. That doesn’t make it suck any less.

Which makes explaining what I am going through very difficult. It’s why watching a movie I find hilarious when I’m depressed doesn’t cheer me up. I just can’t access laughter. I could watch a video of starving children in Africa and not feel moved at all. No access to sadness. The only feeling that seems to survive is frustration. Frustration that you know this is funny, you know this is sad, you know you should be angry. But instead nothing. The tears I cry are not from feeling so sad. It’s from the frustration of feeling nothing at all.

I was there a couple of days ago. I wanted to have a good time with my wife and kids. I wanted to tell jokes and feel the sun on my face and enjoy a spring-like day. But I couldn’t. Jokes just seemed like a waste. There was no humour. The sun was the sun. No joy to be had. Just blank. Isolation. Better off alone. Better off not being around. Life is about feeling. Feeling happy or sad, there is feeling to tell you you’re alive. With no feeling, you are already as if dead. It’s off-putting when you snap back and the depression lifts and you can feel again. Jokes are funny. Starving children are sad. You’re alive. And cannot at all relate to the person you just were a day ago.

So what about anxiety? Anxiety is the mechanism that drives me to depression. Anxiety is normal. Everyone has a limit of stress they can go through before it takes its toll. Anxiety is a way to realize you are going too far and need to step back. Out of control anxiety is always at the ready. Taking things to an extreme. Once the anxiety is too much for the system to handle, it kicks in the isolation to deal with the anxiety. I go from feeling intensely about things I’m worried about to feeling nothing at all. I guess in a way it makes sense. It’s my own weird way of dealing with reality. Because I do my best to not show my anxiety, and keep it all to myself, that the depression really seems from the outside to come out of nowhere. No one sees the flaming car wreck going on inside me. But it’s hard to miss the signs of depression.

My hope is that many will read this and have no idea what it’s like to go through this. But I also have a feeling there are some that can relate. I would like to hear some thoughts and experiences that you have had with depression. Does it feel like isolation? Do you notice a lack of feeling? Or do you feel something else? Let me know in the comments. And most of all, take care of yourself. You only get one you.