Depression, friends and coping mechanisms

Depression and anxiety are a large part of my life and have been since I lost my parents, but this blog isn't about the cause, this is about living with it and what it means for me in what I do and say or just general coping mechanisms I use that you may or may not have noticed me doing if you know me in real life.

I think this might turn into a blog of multiple parts, so I'm only going focus on a few areas here in this first one. How depression effects me, my friendships and social life, and some of my coping mechanisms which may or may not interfere with that. Hopefully it will help others with depression understand their own feelings too.

Having a depression that has a cause, my loss and subsequent problems caused by both the loss and the depression itself. I am constantly in a state of flux, never quite sure how I'll feel when I wake up or what song playing on a shop radio might set me off. Some days I'm good and feel like I can do anything, these are the days where you might see me being creative or going on an adventure with friends. But some days everything will have gone to hell before I even wake up, my dreams have always been very vivid and for the most part quite lucid leaving me feeling very intense emotions as I wake from them. Sometimes I'm lucky and I wake with a sense of peace from the dream, where I'll have maybe seen my parents in a happy situation, but more often than not it'll be a distressing situation, a bad memory or I'll have started with a nice happy dream and have lost them again by the end of it – or sometimes the worse option is it'll feel so real that it's waking that steals them away from me all over again and the day is just left feeling empty.

So the day can start any number of ways, and it can change swiftly throughout the day too – and whilst that is true for everyone it's especially true for people like me who have problems with depression. But what do you do with the days that are bad, I hide, I distract myself to keep the negative thoughts at a distance. I deliberately lose myself in a fantasy world, doing things I cannot avoid on auto pilot. I welcome outside influences that can take me away from my world for even a little while, I long for them, but they don't always come because in hiding myself away from the world to avoid my own pain I have alienated myself from friends. I have unintentionally distanced myself from the very people who keep me afloat in a sea of negativity. I have lost lifelines and lights of hope and I feel like an outsider staring in at a life fading away. In hiding myself away from pain, I’ve inadvertently caused myself and others more and I'm hoping that realising this is a step towards fixing things and towards healing myself too.

Some days I'm very defensive, take every little thing to heart and end up saying things I regret. I say things I regret a lot, my emotions are very near the surface at the best of times, but when I'm having a down day they are completely on the surface and friends and family often take the brunt of those emotions, then the anxiety kicks in and I stress out about whether they were really offended or if they understood why it happened. 

I've always had trouble meeting new people and coping with new situations, anxiety has always been a part of my life, but more so since the depression first hit. I started getting panic attacks and some of my friends have witnessed some of them, but not the worst ones. I try not to talk about them, maybe out of embarrassment maybe just because thinking about them makes that horrible tight feeling rise up in my chest again. Thankfully I haven't had any really bad ones for a long time now, but they still happen and even writing about them just now is making my chest feel tight. It's almost a conditioned response now, it makes me run and hide from whatever makes those feelings kick in. This is one reason I make excuses about not being able to do things or go places, fear. Not the there's a dinosaur chasing me and I really don't want to get eaten kind of fear, but just as powerful because it's not a dinosaur, but it is a monster. For me the anxiety and depression have become intertwined, each causing the other to be stronger or scarier and that itself is enough to cause the fear without any other outside influence.

Depression isn't something that you can just cure and it's gone like a disease, it's like that analogy of bullying with the crumpled up piece of paper, you can unroll the paper and flatten it out but it'll never be the same again, it'll always be damaged. Alcoholism is a pretty close analogy too, you can stop drinking but you'll never stop being an alcoholic.

So to my friends reading this, please don't think that just because I haven't seen you for a while or tried to make plans with you that I don't care, or that I've forgotten about you, I’m still here and I still care, I might just be stuck in a dark place hoping someone will help me find my way out again, hoping that you might know where to look.