I recently reminded myself that journaling is a good practice for my mind, especially since I often find myself with nothing to do these days. This is a huge turn of events, considering just one year ago I was so socially busy I found myself unable to free time for myself at all. As embarrassing as it sounds, reading my past few posts made me realize my eloquence has severely deteriorated from lack of usage. Nevertheless, I'll do my best to start regularly journaling once again, and hopefully restore my writing back to how it once was during my college days.
However, before going forward, I feel obligated to do a quick recap on the past year's activities. Firstly, I can say with confidence that my battle with depression has finally come to an end. There are many unpublished drafts detailing my struggles with misery, which at its worst lasted from August 2014 to April 2015. Retrospectively, these were the worst months of my life filled with the widest range of turbulent emotions and physical issues: disgust, despair, jealousy, self-loathing, insomnia, anorexia. I felt so ruined I was ready to give up everything for the sake of happiness. Hence, I feel compelled to post at least one of these considering they contain some of my most honest and heartfelt thoughts chronicling the most troubling times in all my years of living.
This entry was started in the late spring and was never quite completed, but I did my best to summarily give it some semblance of ending.
I read over the last post I made, and realized I haven't made much progress at all these last few months. In fact, browsing through my various unpublished drafts, it's pretty apparent that my depression has just been spiraling downward into a pit hole of sadness.
So I live day-to-day in perpetual misery, doing whatever it is I do to distract myself from facing reality. I watch anime and read manga. I stay at work late. I drink when I'm alone. It's so terrible I know, but this is what I do to keep myself from falling into despair.
But, there are a few minute details that I understand now about myself.
1. I seek attention. As I grow older year after year, I realize how much more difficult it is to make friends. Not convenience friends, but lasting friendships that prevail through the weathering of time. What I want most are friends that understand me, that I know I can count on in times of need. I value friendship more than anything else in the world. This is what my heart yearns for, and the primary reason as for why life is so tough these days.
2. When I'm unhappy, I tend to self-destruct. In the early stages of my mental collapse, when my so-called friends fell short of my expectations, I began to shy away from them. It's a protective mechanism, but that only made me all the more unhappier. I wanted people to notice me—that I was unhappy and missing from their lives. But that never happened. Life moved on, and nobody cared whether I was there or not. Week after week I would pull away from them, wallow in my own self-pity, and then rejoin them when I was feeling better.
As time went on, the times I did this became more frequent and noticeable, but still nothing would change. This went on for months until one day... I suddenly realized that I've gone too far—something had changed. As much as I tried and tried, I tried to bring myself back, but it was too late. I had moved out of the inner circle that I had worked so hard to be a part of.
3. I think the absolute worst in people. I bottle up all my negativity hoping people don't notice. I act as though everything is fine, and, at least in the beginning, I was really good at it. But as everyone else grew closer as I became more distanced, my negativity began to slowly leak out from within me and people certainly began to take notice.
I couldn't help but question how they could continue on as though nothing had happened though I had disappeared from their lives. My speculations turned into spitefulness that I so desperately tried to contain. At first, it was a slow progression of passive-aggressiveness, coming out as what I perceived to be sharp words I didn't mean to say. This endless cycle of internal conflict continued to increase in frequency... until I one day in March, I broke.
I tried so desperately to be someone I'm not.
I grew tired of it.
When my Australian friend came over, he told me something I thought to be ridiculous. He told me that I love misery, that I'm addicted to misery, that I wanted to be miserable.
And lately I realized that it might be true.
