There’s what’s up.

It wasn’t until my friend Jeremy asked me, kindly, at 5:30 AM on Monday while we were making the long drive back to town after visiting his lovely wife the day before if “anything didn’t give [me] The Feels these days” that I realized that something was wrong.

I’m going through a moderate bout of depression. I have been for a while. It’s…strange to realize that.

I am not new to depression. I’ve had three severe periods, each lasting at least six months. All of them were brought on immediately by major events. One (that I’m willing to talk about) occurred after I quit my job, started college, my boyfriend dumped me, and a friend committed suicide in the same week. I felt comatose for six months and eyed the kitchen knives because I thought: life will always be like this. It will never, ever stop being like this. This is my life now, and it sucks, so what’s the point of living? 

Things got better. Eventually. But I lost some friends in the process. (Albeit they were shitty friends, but they were the only ones I had. So. That sucked.)

Fast forward to this year. This year, man. It’s been the most brutal of my life. And as someone who has suffered/is suffering from PTSD, I do not say that lightly. PTSD at least had the mercy to make me numb.

This year? I have felt everything. I have felt un-chosen, like everyone in my life had looked at me and said “I choose ______ over you, Kammah.” I have felt unloved and lonely and cut off and passed over.

I have felt the loss of the life that should have been and almost was. It was there and then it was just…not. And all the possibilities that came with it, the dreams and the hopes and the future laid out before me, beckoning and lovely and simple and fine and pure, were just…gone. Up and vanished. And there I am, clutching, trying to bring back what is no longer there.

But. You know. Life moves on. I am continuing to pick up the pieces, slowly, because it’s gone and it’s not coming back and if I’m not at least trying to look forward, my whole body aches and it feels like my heart is trying to claw its way out of my chest. Still. Ten months later. I wonder if that feeling will ever pass. I hope against hope that it will.

I prided myself in not slipping into the abyss after everything happened in February.  As if depression is something that you can just control with the power of your will not to be in it. I mean, sure, I had Bad Days but I wasn’t depressed.

Until. You know. It turns out that I’m not over things. It turns out that I’m being mind-fucked about some things that I’m not willing, or able, to talk about here. It turns out that I’m heartbroken. I thought I had healed enough to function and act like a reasonable human person and carry on living. But a couple solid months of nightmares, insomnia, anxiety about The Blathering (which I went to! And it was awesome! And I really shouldn’t have worried as much about it as I did!), some personal life stuff that I got excited about when I shouldn’t have (hope, man. It’ll screw you over every time.), a minor cold that I got which left me with a cough that I couldn’t seem to shake, and work running me into the ground. And it turns out that all of those things were enough to just kinda…sidle up to me and bump me into a depression. A moderate one, but still.

I have no reason to think that things will become severe. And I’ve asked my mom and a couple of close friends to keep an eye on me, just in case. But I’m in the suck right now, I don’t feel very well, and I just thought I should let you know, Friend.

Thanks for listening.