Deep dive

A warning. This post delves deep into my psychological state. If you can’t handle open discussion of depression, feelings, and all the messy things then you might need to wait for the next one. Also it’s going to jump around a lot. I have a lot of thoughts that I’m trying to parse out.

Depression is a tricky thing. You spend most of your time fighting against a brain that makes you think you are worth less than dirt. You evaluate your friendships in a way that makes you doubt they even like you. Everything you say is under scrutiny, not by others, but by yourself. Last week I made an effort to journal everyday and it did something to me. It forced me to actually think about my day-to-day and was the proverbial straw on the camel’s back.

Some back story: Early this year I lost my father to a heart attack. I didn’t get the opportunity to say goodbye, and had the vast majority of the funerary arrangements saddled on my back and apparently the way I handle grief is to just not think about it. I went back to work right away. I tried to keep normal as much as possible. I put everything in an emotional backpack and tell myself “I’ll think about it later.” It’s the same with things that make me angry, sad, depressed, overly emotional. I put it in my emotional backpack and say to myself “I’ll think about it later.”

More back story: An incident with a “family member” on Thanksgiving day shook my foundations a little bit. It made me more angry and violated than I think I’ve ever been. I was doing well to take a little bit from my emotional backpack every so often to deal with but for some reason this Thanksgiving incident just shook a bunch of stuff loose. I haven’t been in a great mindset some days and others I just feel like I’m trapped in my own head, replaying tons of my emotional baggages over and over.

I do this thing sometimes called Therapy Cries. Usually when I’m in the car driving somewhere and the music just happens to be right, these moments of replaying the things that make me sad or upset come to a crescendo and suddenly I’m leaking out of my face. I let it happen, one of the few times that I do. Most of the time I hate letting other people see me cry. It takes a great deal of trust and an idea that the person isn’t going to use it against me. It’s a strange and odd combination of bandages that have built up from a few instances of betrayed trust.

So my emotional baggage got all splayed everywhere after the Thanksgiving incident and at first I latched onto a safer emotion: Anger. But usually with me anger fades quickly, I have no ability to keep a grudge, so ultimately nearly every drive more than 15 minutes anywhere after Thanksgiving ended up being a Therapy Cry.  

I guess I had a little breakthrough sometime early this week and my most recent Therapy Cry was on Thursday while I was heading to a friend’s house to hang out. I realized and had the verbal confirmation with myself that I missed my father. I know that probably seems obvious, but it was one of those feelings I had packed away and tried to not think about. It hurt too, because my dad was one of those people I could just call up whenever and have a hours long conversation about everything and I realized in his absence that I had been subconsciously trying to find someone else to call up when I felt like talking. Thankfully I have a good handful of people that I can talk to in person and I’ve been lucky this week to get to chat with a few of them.      

The prior week of journaling everyday in an attempt get myself writing everyday really pushed me to start considering my day-to-day. It was good, and frankly very therapeutic, and hopefully next week I can keep it up and keep pushing myself to let myself actually THINK about me. I don’t tend to talk to people about my problems unless they poke and prod at me to get them or unless it’s so bad that I just have to talk it out. Getting to talk to friends has been great to delve into my psyche and in a couple of occasions help others delve into theirs.