It’s the day before Christmas, which means the end of the year, which means I’m starting to think of all I haven’t accomplished in the past year. Again. There are two times I do this in a concentrated way, one is my birthday, and one is at the end of the year. Both are grim times, and even though they’ve gotten better over the years, some years they hit harder than others. This, apparently, is one of those times. It’s sad, too, because I really wasn’t expecting it. I used to hate and dread Christmas, but this year? I was cruising along, not giving a damn. Then, about a week ago, I started noticing that I was becoming testier and that my thoughts were turning darker. I say testier and darker because I’m always testy and my thoughts are usually dark, but there was a marked downward turn. If you’ve never experienced depression, it can be difficult to understand. “Hey, Minna, if you notice that you’re starting to feel depressed, why not just do something to prevent it from happening?”
Believe me, if I could, I would. Nothing is more frustrating than realizing that I’m slipping in a depression and feeling helpless to stop it. Correction–it was worse when I’d start feeling depressed, but didn’t realize that I was tumbling into the abyss. The world would turn gray, and all the colors drained from my life*. I’d start thinking about everything I hate about myself, and before I knew it, I’d be inert on the couch. Back then, I had voices in my head all the time, one in particular. I called him The Dictator because he was so rigid and unyielding. He was absolutely ruthless in crushing any whit of self-esteem that I had. There were lesser voices in my head as well that I thought of as his minions, and they did his bidding 24/7. The Dictator was so real to me that I could almost see him. He fed me a steady stream of negativity until it was all I could think. “You’re worthless.” “You’re fat.” “You’re ugly.” “You’re gross.” “You should die.” “Nobody loves you.” “Nobody should love you.” The worst part was that he knew my weaknesses so well, he would sprinkle enough truth in his statements to make me believe him. “You’re so needy and clingy” would preface “no one will ever love you”, and because the former is true, it was hard for me to deny the latter.
I know it’s weird for me to talk about him as if he’s an entity outside of myself, but it’s how I felt at the time. I had this intruder in my brain, and he ruled my brain with an iron fist. I believed everything he said and allowed him free reign of my mind until my last therapist finally got me to talk about him. I’m making it seem cut-and-dried, but it was anything but. I didn’t know this person lived in my brain, much less that he had absolute control over my thinking until after many years of working with my last** therapist. With patience, she was able to tease out that I had this complex system of shoulds and shouldn’t, what I had to do and what I couldn’t. There were stupid things such as if I looked at a clock and it was on the quarter hour, I had to count to twenty-five. When my therapist heard about that one, she asked what would happen if I didn’t. I started to answer, but i couldn’t because I had never thought of refusing. I just automatically did it. I don’t know how it even started, but it soon became a hard and fast rule that I had to do it. After my therapist asked me that question, I consciously stopped myself from counting in that situation. At first, it was uncomfortable and I counted more often than not, but I was able to break the habit. Now, I only start counting if I’m really stressed, and I rarely finish.
First of, I am grateful for everyone who’s checked in on me today, either on my blog or through email or both. Whenever I feel like I’m hitting rock bottom, there are friends who remind me that they are looking out for me. I can say that at least this time, I can feel the support and care surrounding me. It’s more than I could have said ten or fifteen years ago. It’s not because I didn’t have friends who didn’t love and support me back then (indeed, I did. Some are the very same friends I have today). It’s because back then, I felt worthless all the time. The blog entry I wrote yesterday would have been tame back then. My extent of self-loathing and sense of worthlessness was so deep, there wasn’t anything anyone could tell me to convince me that I deserved to take up space on this earth. I simply could not grasp why I should be alive.
I don’t belong in this world. I realized that when I was in my teens, but I have felt it since–well since I was sentient, I suppose.