Originally Posted by
vaticanplum
WM, I'm so sorry you're going through this. You sound like you've really been rattled with some bad luck. It never ceases to amaze me how brutal life can be in the timing of doling out luck sometimes. I mean that both within lives and across entire lives.
Add me to the list of people who've been there within the last few years. I'm going to say an incredibly dickish thing and admit that I'm at a point in my life where I probably would have said, if pressed for my conscious thoughts on the matter, that I thought I was immune to that kind of thing. I had the stability and the outlook and the genetic makeup such that I just would have assumed that if I were someone prone to depression, it would have come out long before then. But life can get hard with no warning. Poor choices catch up to you, bad luck snowballs, loneliness can debilitatingly isolate you even when you are loved. Sometimes I feel like things have been bad for me as much by having my own worldview and self-view upended as by circumstances themselves. It sounds like you feel very unmoored and I do know exactly how that feels.
I'm going to fly in the face, probably, of conventional wisdom and not tell you that things will get better. Not because it isn't true, but because when I was at my worst (and I'm by no means out of the woods yet), that was full-stop the last thing I wanted to hear. It always felt like a catchphrase that no one could put any guarantees on...because no one can put guarantees on that, because no one knows the future. If someone was going to tell me that things were going to get better, they'd better damn well be able to quantify it, and not just be someone for whom things were going better than they were for me. I could picture things getting worse (like, everyone I know dying or something), but I could not picture things getting better. And that phrase was supposed to help? Depression is (by definition?) the absence of hope, and so working that much harder to have hope for the very non-concrete, very non-quantifiable adage that things would get better actually felt counterproductive to me. I felt like it made things worse.
What I can say with absolute certainty is that things change. Sometimes they change for the worse and sometimes for the better, but most of the time they just change with no immediate better-or-worse qualification. They affect your life in ways that carry it along and shape it, and you have a degree of agency in how they shape it, especially as time goes on and you have more experience and perspective on your previous life events.
I'm not a therapist, and I've somehow stupidly, circumstantially never been in therapy, so I'm not speaking from a professional perspective but just from my own when I say that depression narrows your whole existence. The loneliness is isolating. The lack of interest in things eliminates new ideas and knowledge and experiences. The whole metaphor of depression being a dark existence is almost literal, not metaphorical: your existence becomes so focused on your own life, your own lack of place in the world, that it blacks out everything else. It totally warps your perspective of the world beyond your own experience, no matter how hard you try to crawl out of your own thoughts. At least that was my experience.
What is so, so important to remember is that the inevitable change that defines life is not limited to you. It's incredibly hard to remember this when you're so entrenched in the difficulty of your own day-to-day existence, but the very lack of control we sometimes feel over our own circumstances is, somewhat ironically, the same thing that could shake up your life any day, any moment. Things which do not originate from you and do not even have anything to do with you will affect and change you. The world is very big and there is a lot going on. Someone will write a book that you will read and will change the whole way you see the world. Someone you meet will see something in you that you didn't see in yourself. Something will shift in the way the world runs which will give rise to a type of work that didn't exist before and which may be the work you were born to do. The Reds will win a game -- or hell, lose one -- in a way that gives you sudden clarity about something in your life.
I'm not saying this to back up the adage "things get better." I'm saying that good and bad things will both continue to happen to you, but life is a game of odds, and the more you ensure that things continue to happen to you at all, the more you up your odds that things will change in a way that will work for you. Nine out of 10 people you talk to in life may not quantifiably make your life "better", and some may even make it worse. But the more people you talk to, the more you up your odds that you're going to find your way to that tenth person, and along the way you are communicating and getting outside of yourself and opening the world back up. Keep taking classes, because they will remind you that there are still things to learn, and one of those things will change you. Keep volunteering, because it widens your perspective, and because YOU are likely to be that change for someone else in those circumstances, probably without your even knowing it. There are people out there who need you every bit as much as you need them, but you will not find them unless you look. Every human being is predisposed to believe the world revolves around him or her, and it's not because we're selfish or incapable of empathy, but because we only have our own experience to go on so it's impossible for us to organically understand anyone else's world. But the more we force ourselves out of our own familiar worlds, the richer they all become. Every bad event becomes not a symbol of one snowballing crappy life, but as just another change, the kind that happens to everybody, and the kind that mirrors the good events that you will see more and more of, in both other people's lives and your own.
Just do everything you can to keep the world close to you. Depression pushes everything out. It mires you to your personal circumstances, your bad luck, your past decisions, like cement blocks, and it drags you away from everything else. But expose yourself to as much as you can, as much as you can bring yourself to see, to experience, to talk about, to learn about, to create, to everything. You will continue to get hurt and you will find that some things aren't worth pursuing or keeping in your life. But if you keep everything outside of your very current, very personal situation at arm's length, then change can't get in. Things will change, period. You say you are a piece without a puzzle, but if you continue to expose yourself to the wonder of the world, the good and the bad, then you are going to change shape. And the world is always changing shape too, every second. The more everything changes, the more chances you have to find a fit.