Depressive

Being depressive is like being separated from the world. Like everything in it is just a movie that I'm watching from the outside. Reaching into that movie and trying to interact with it can be very challenging; I seem to lose the power of speech. I can eat (just about), sleep and watch the world. That's more or less it. I'm often told that other people find it much harder to tell when I'm depressive than when I'm hypomanic or 'normal', and maybe that's partly my fault. It's the nature of depression - it hides itself away, it doesn't want to be seen. But it could be so easy to say one little sentence: "I'm having a bad day." If I could bring myself to say it. But I can't tell people how I feel, ever. It's just the way I am.

I think of all the symptoms I have to deal with, the hardest one to cope with is the loss of interest in daily activities and hobbies. I genuinely love the ukulele, and I find it painful when I have a day when I can barely pick it up, let alone play it to an acceptable standard. It doesn't help when people try to remind me how much I love it or how good I am; I still struggle to feel it. It's difficult to feel anything.

What people don't seem to understand is that when I'm like this I mostly just want to be left to wallow in it. I want to have a cup of tea and be quietly contemplative for a while. This is generally perceived as an unhealthy behaviour, but if withdrawing myself for a bit helps me to process my emotional instability and get through it, surely this makes it a healthy behaviour? It's my coping mechanism and I'm comfortable with it. The main problem is, when I'm hypomanic or 'normal', I'm generally fairly ok with people, but when I'm depressive it's difficult to maintain a conversation or say anything meaningful, which makes me appear antisocial and I hate it. I hope one day the meds will stop this happening, but for now I just have to wait for it to pass.