It’s late February in Kansas and my weather app tells me it’s 67 degrees outside.
What beautiful weather we’re having!
Objectively speaking, 67 degrees F is a “nice day”. It’s still a few degrees too cold to be considered perfect to me, but I and the vast majority of people would agree that it is a nice day outside. Oh, and considering that it’s still winter? It’s BEAUTIFUL out there!
Which is why I opened up my blinds. So I can at least observe the sunshine while I lay in bed and be sad. [sarcastic condescending voice:] it’s called “self-care”, maybe you’ve read about it on tumblr?
I do not have a habit of actively laying in bed and being sad. I don’t have a habit of actively being sad at all. Most of my habits are to distract myself and/or others from how sad I actually am. Why? Well, it’s probably obvious, but just so that we’re all on the same page, it’s because being sad all the time is kind of… Sad.
That’s pretty obvious, right? Redundant, actually. Depression is not obvious. Rarely is depression obvious. It’s so much more subtle that than. I know I’m depressed and I know I have an anxiety disorder or five. But I still smile and laugh at jokes and make jokes and have many moments of genuine happiness throughout the day, and I’m lucky enough to have more days with at least 3 solid “happy” moments than not. I’m an okay student, I have a part time job on the weekends, I have friends, I haven’t had a lot of semi-suicidal thoughts lately… I’m happy! I mean it, I am a happy person! I’m laying in bed in sweatpants with unwashed hair and I’m crying, but I’m still a happy person!
Depression sneaks up on you. Today, I realized that I was bummed out, and that I had been consistently bummed out for at least a week. I realized I should probably do something about it.
Normally, I just scroll through Twitter and try to hold a good conversation or two over text message and then in the inbetweens when Twitter is dead and I’m waiting for them to text back, I just dick around on other apps. That’s been my life when I have free time for maybe a year now: unknowingly or unintentionally distracting myself from lingering to unrelenting feelings of “not happy”.
Today was a little different. Not for any specific reason, it just was. Maybe some other time I’ll speculate on all the little things that happened today and twist it into something beautiful and meaningful – like it was warm and sunny out, so I decided to lay in bed and with the blinds open and confront my feelings, and now I feel better, and that’s like a metaphor for life… There’s sunshine outside, just waiting for you to open the blinds– y'know, some high-quality bullshit that we all eat up cause it sounds pretty and simplifies life to a concept small and simple enough for us to feel like we might actually be in control of it.
While that was a whimsical little tangent I just went off on, that’s not what I’m writing about today. (I don’t actually know what I’m writing about, this is just a slightly scripted stream-of-consciousness style rant.) I started off writing about it being a beautiful day, so I think it’s time i try to swing this helvetica-faced concoction of emotional diarrhea back to that topic.
It’s a beautiful day today. Which is why I decided that instead of hiding in my dark basement under the false pretense that I’m going to study once I’m “done with Twitter” (sweetheart, I am never done with Twitter), I was going to lay in bed for 1 hour and be sad. I think when I was at the bottom of the staircase, I told myself I was just gonna take a nap or whatever, but by the top of the stairs I was thinking about the lovely weather…
“We’re gonna open the blinds, observe and acknowledge the sunshine, cut the shit and be real with our feelings for an hour”.
It’s technically been two and a half hours. I don’t need to try to make an excuse why. I’m me. Laying around for hours like this is what I do. We can speculate on why I do that in another essay.
So I’m back on topic and I’ve addressed that depression is subtle and the “actively being sad” thing. Check. I think this is the part where I need to analyze why I’ve been mumbling about this shit with my thumbs on a touch screen for 45ish minutes now.
I hate to be an even bigger disappointment than I already view myself as (thanks to that “depression” filter on the Instagram selfie that serves as a metaphor for my self-image), but I don’t know where the fuck I’m going with this iPhone-note-turned-essay I’m writing.
If I was 14, I’d be totally content with concluding these thoughts with “All I know is that it’s a beautiful day outside, and I’m just laying in bed being sad”. But I’m not 14. If I’m going be emo, I want it to mean something. Yes, we can all relate to the sentiment of being sad when the conditions surrounding you are optimum for feeling happy. That’s literally what depression is.
It’s a beautiful day outside, and I’m laying in bed being sad.
It’s a beautiful day outside, and I chose to stay inside and being sad. It’s 67 degrees in February in Kansas, and I decided to go to my room, hide under the covers and actively be sad because I have depressing thoughts and feelings floating around inside me, and they need to be confronted, not swept under the emotional rug with temporary distractions.
But I can’t hide from my feelings forever. After all, they’re my own feelings, nobody else is gonna feel them for me. They live in the same body I do–it would be like trying to hide my foot from myself–impossible.
Ready for another extended metaphor? Your depression is your dirty laundry. You can ignore it and let it pile up until you run out of clean undies (I think clean undies represents “happiness”, just roll with me). Your depression will catch up with you eventually. I can keep hiding from myself indefinitely. But one day, let’s say a month and a half from now, when it’s consistently warm enough that most days are “beautiful days”, I’m going to want to be outside and happy, but my depression and/or my coping mechanisms (i.e. laying around on my phone to distract myself from my real feelings) are going to win. The metaphorical pile of emotional laundry will be overflowing out of its hamper, and you are officially out of clean undies and you have a really hot date in the amount of time it would take you to do a load of laundry, minus 25 minutes… You’re fucked, dirty laundry won. My depression wins the coin toss over who gets to decide over how I spend the day.
I chose to stay inside and be sad today because I hope that giving myself a little time be real with my feelings, to identify and accept (and maybe even wallow in) my depressed thoughts and feelings of hopelessness and emptiness that I carry around like loose change at the bottom of my emotional bar purse, would give me the kind of spiritual healing or closure necessary to keep battling my depression.
I chose to stay inside and be sad today so that in the near future, when I actually want to go outside and be happy, I might actually be able to.
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