Depression is Depressing. III

You don't want to hear it, so I just won't say it.

That's why I'm so quiet.

Alone in Nowhere

I am lonely. The group of friends I had in college has narrowed down to two, neither of whom lives in this part of the country. Somehow, socializing with family doesn't do it for me. I can spend hours talking to them, and I'm only more tense at the end because frankly, my family doesn't like or understand me.

This isn't the kind of they don't understand me that I spouted when I was in high school. I suffer from clinical depression, and they can't wrap their minds around the concept of not just "cheering up." We have different interests. I'd rather stay inside where I'm physically comfortable than sit by a lake. I enjoy exploring the Internet. I enjoy researching something to death in order to write a one-page short story that I'll never show anyone. I tend toward solitude, and my family is made up of highly social people. Overwhelmingly social people. Opinionated people.

Not that I'm not opinionated. The problem, however, is that they have difficulty accepting other viewpoints as valid, and when someone explains motivation for a different viewpoint, they tend to zone out and start thinking up their next argument instead of listening.

So I'm ruling out calling my father to chat about my day-to-day life. Just saying.

That leaves me with two friends, with whom I can only communicate online. I have no phone. I cannot afford a phone. I believe I have three dollars to my name right now, and every two weeks I get between thirty and forty dollars of child support, so driving to the nearest city (an hour and a half) to find an open social group other than the Eastern Star Lodge isn't feasible. To be fair, I have been to the lodge before. I was just bored and uncomfortable being stared at by the other members, all of whom are at least forty years older than me.

I've mentioned this before, but my friends have lives. So what do I do? This is a legitimate, honest question. I've set emotion aside for now to deal with this logically, mostly because I'm wiped out from entertaining my grandmother for five hours. She's lovely to talk to now and then, but it's difficult making conversation when I can't talk about any of my interests.

Sample of Interests (moi)
computers
internet and internet trends
contemporary art
typography
fiction writing
internet research: most recently, BDSM and D/s relationships, and rubber ducks. Totally unrelated, I swear.
abnormal psychology

Everyone's got some oddball combination of things they enjoy discussing, and that's not a finite list, but perhaps you can see the potential for conflict when I'm living in a small town near another small town known for its lake and fishing.

So now I've bored you to death. Pumpernickel. Quartz. Bonobo chimpanzee. That ought to spice things up.

This one time at the cheese factory, a chunk of fat-free cheese fell on the floor, thereby making it inedible. Since it smells like rubber in large volumes, I used my box knife to carve it roughly into the shape of a ball, then dropped it on the floor. Nothing as awesome as a SuperBall, but the fact that it bounced well enough to entertain me for a while is worth noting. I don't eat fat-free cheese, by the way.

No One

One of the many problems with long-term depression is that it doesn't stop. There's no three-month period where you're sunshine and roses, and everyone can just enjoy your company and forget the depression ever existed. It's constant, and that makes it extremely difficult to find anyone to talk to when you desperately need to talk.

Everyone has problems. Everyone has bills they need to pay, everyone has things they need to do and not enough time to do them. Everyone has people who need things from them, and that's not a complaint, it's a fact of life. People have problems.

I can't ask my friends and family to put their problems aside and listen to my unfounded worries (or my completely legitimate worries) every time I have a stress attack. They know I'm stressed. They know I'm broke, that I hate myself so much sometimes that I can hardly stand to take another breath, and there's really nothing they can do about it. They can't take care of me.

I should be able to take care of myself, anyway. I should. But for some reason, I can't deal with stress the way "normal" people can. I can go take a shower, try to read a book, snuggle under some blankets, eat comfort food, tell myself repeatedly that someone loves me, and the entire time I'm still on the verge of breaking down.

Does it really matter if someone loves me? Not really. In the face of crippling depression, logically knowing that someone loves me doesn't help. If I die, they'll be miserable for a while, but they'll go on, because that's what people do. When I'm in heaven or hell or purgatory or limbo or being reborn as a dung beetle, is it really going to bother me that a handful of mortals on planet Earth will be left mourning? Probably not. They'll comfort each other, assure each other that they'll see their loved ones in heaven.

No matter how many times I try to convince myself that I've made a positive difference in someone's life, or that I might in the future, I still feel empty and useless. There's nothing I can do that no one else in the world could do. If I don't do it, someone will fill my place.

No happy ending this time. That's life; suck it up.