Last week I was told that I had mild depression. It didn’t really come as a surprise to me, considering a family history of illness, both physical and mental (boy genetics can really be a bitch sometimes.) Now, I definitely want to separate myself from those who suffer from heavy depression because I have never experienced that and I don’t want to pretend that I have. However, since I’m obviously already failing with my daily blog posts, I thought I’d just end up writing how practically every other blogger writes, whenever and about whatever they feel.
I guess looking back I can definitely see the difference in my mood from my freshman year of college to now. Last year I was happier, living off campus (which was great), funnier, more talkative, giddier and less worried about school. This year has been the opposite in most respects. I don’t see my friends as often as I did, which makes me quieter than normal. I’m more anxious about graduation requirements. I’m feeling sluggish, tired, unmotivated, uninspired, and most extremely apathetic (is that even possible????) I’m apathetic about everything. That is how I described myself in high school, but I’ve take it to an extreme. I’ve lost sight of who I wanted to be in terms of a career and in my general personality. I just feel like nothing is going to work out for me and I can foresee doing mundane paperwork for the rest of my life. I feel like I’ve lost some of the brain sparks that made me the delightful person I once was.
Apparently, that’s called being depressed.
I consider myself to be decently self-aware. I can typically take a step back and see myself from another person’s perspective. I don’t use this ability as a way of necessarily changing the way I am, but more as a reasoning tool. Yet, despite my cognizance, I’m surprised and a bit amazed at how long it took me to discover this challenge. It never felt like my mindset had changed, only that my physical situation had. It’s taken me a while to try and remember that this isn’t how I have always felt.
Even despite this illness, I can still laugh and be amazed by something and have a good time with my friends and feel good emotions. There was this moment today when I couldn’t stop smiling and laughing in public and I had to try and hide it so I didn’t look psychotic. I’m still laughing about it now! Depression for me doesn’t always mean wearing gray sweatpants and staying in bed for two hours after you’ve woken up (although I do do that pretty much everyday because I’m a slave to my computer.)
Anyway, today was a particularly bad day because I found out I had to interview a stranger and write a story on him or her by next week. I started to feel kinda physically sick, which was weird because I had never had that kind of reaction to writing a story on a stranger before (although maybe it had to do with that really strong coffee and the way I practically inhaled a cup of granola for breakfast.)
As the wise Jamie Lee Curtis has said, “87 percent of this country suffers from digestive issues like occasional irregularity.”
So I suppose I’ll try to be more active and eat properly and see if that helps anything. I don’t know what kind of effect anti-depressants have on me, but it seems weak to resort to drugs at this stage and I’ve seen what they do to a person (cough, Diana Goodman in Next to Normal, cough.)
Noelle well well 