I have no right to unhappiness
The strangest thing about mental illness is how much it will make you feel bad for even having it. Here I am trying to put my emotions and mental state into writing and 30 seconds later i’ve convinced myself that I’m a bad person because i’m foisting emotional labor onto my friends who’ve done enough, and I don’t do enough for them, and anyways I don’t really have it that bad and consequently i must be just playing up these symptoms so that people will pay attention to me.
Consequently, I’ve made and deleted several versions of this post. This will be a bit rambly, so please bear with me.
Just a few months ago, I was positive that I was going to apply to grad school. I was going to get out of my boring, uninteresting job, and leave silicon valley, which may very well be the asshole of the continental US, and go do something. Surely, I thought, if I went back to academia, to solving puzzles instead of systems of generating invoices, I would be, not happy, but, happier.
And here we are. I talked to the people, and I made a plan, and my september deadline came and went. Flew by. By now I should have a list of schools and a draft of a personal statement, and be signed up for the GRE.
I haven’t done one of those things.
The worst part is I’m not surprised. This is just classic me, all over again. Seems like the path of least resistance will always win out. Tried to get back into art. It was great up until it got hard. Then my motivation vanished. Ditto for writing. Same thing for moving to SoCal and working in animation.
So many plans for the future that I’ve felt so sure of. And each one has fallen apart. Am I afraid that they won’t make me happy? Do I just not want to leave behind my cushy job and benefits? Or do I just not want to fail, to try, to have to work hard for once in my life? Because I’m running out of excuses. I have the time, the money, the energy to pursue all these things and more. I’m not chronically ill, not distant with my family, I have a cushy job and I know where my meals are coming from. I don’t have the right to feel this self-sabotaging bullshit anymore.
I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness in the last couple weeks, mostly because I realized I haven’t been feeling quite so much. Not to the extent of my previous depressive episodes. I don’t want to die, at any rate. But I’ve started going to bed at 9pm just because there isn’t anything else I want to do. Nothing that made me happy seems to do it anymore.
I’m not sure entirely why I made this post, but if I had to guess, the manipulative part of me wants validation from others without feeling like I am directly foisting my problems onto them. After all, if they choose to respond, am I really making them? It’s pathetic, like me, and with a statement like that, this passive pity party loop starts up all over again where I play up feeling bad so people will pity me.
Maybe the Lexapro just isn’t as effective anymore. Good thing I’ve got a psychiatrist appointment on tuesday. I hope that this is just a low point, because I don’t want to go back to where I was before. I didn’t like the person I was then.
