For background knowledge, I suffer from dysthymia/PDD (persistent depressive disorder) and MDD (major depressive disorder, clinical depression). Both of these form double depression. I have anxiety and general depression-- but that’s just kinda there.
I’ve been having a really hard time since April. Normally, the holidays are hard. April’s hard too-- but it got so much worse this year. My grandmother (I was adopted, so she was the only thing to a mother I had) passed away in April of 2016. I was barely an adult, and I was still going through high school. She passed away a month before I graduated. I had to watch cancer take her, this being her third bout with it. When I was 9, she had a brain tumor and thyroid cancer. I watched her be hospitalized-- I was terrified she was going to die. When I was 14, I watched her get lung cancer. They took half of her left lung, she contracted MRSA- she was hospitalized for a month. When I was 18, she got lung cancer again, but it was too late. It was already Stage 4, they gave her six months to live, she died within a month.
I can still see how she died. I still remember watching her in her hospital room. It haunts me, I’m crying trying to write this right now. This year marks year six, almost year seven of her being gone-- and it’s hurt so much worse.
I was in a relationship. We had some rough spots here and there-- but we were trying to make it work. I always warn everyone that April is the worst month of the year for me. He wanted me to try and get my mental health in check back in March. I agreed. I tried Prozac, but we had a talk about it since SSRIs prior didn’t do any good for me. And it didn’t. I only had my consultation for therapy- I didn’t have anything set in stone yet.
I had a really bad dysthymic episode. I was nervous, I was scared, I was highly elevated. I wanted to talk to him to just calm down. He was drinking, and we fought over it. He decided we needed a “break”, and stonewalled me for three weeks from any contact from him. We’ve went back and forth with this break scenario-- it’d be practically too long to explain this whole situation on that. He’s went completely MIA from Discord now, but I want to put my emotions behind and assume it’s because he’s studying for finals and working a lot.
I’m in therapy weekly, I took a genesight test(awaiting results) to see what kind of medication will work for me since everything has had bad side effects, I’m in psychiatry-- but that’s up and down because they don’t exactly know what’s going on, I contact the crisis lines frequently after I feel there’s nothing I can do-- nothing helps. In fact, the crisis lines tend to brush me off since I’m not at the end of my line. Dysthymia is high functioning depression. I mask well, until I can’t. And I’ve been trying literally the best I can.
Distractions don’t help. In fact, it makes my double depression episodes worse. I wanted to be an animator. I went to college for it, and then IT. Once I went to school for IT-- my will for drawing stopped. I wanted to do so much more and make actual composition pieces and actually get to where I feel like I can achieve my dreams. I can’t even study anymore.
A counselor on the crisis line told me I experience severe apathy. I do what I have to do throughout the day: wake up, get dressed, work, do what my family asks of me-- and that’s it. If I feel I can even attempt to draw, I’m hitting revenge sleep procrastination-- and I already can’t sleep well on my own. Nothing helps, nothing works, and I start to miss how I used to draw all the time every day a bit more. I’m tired of feeling like I’ll never be able to do anything anymore except dig myself further in the grave.
