As my junior/senior/third/whatever year draws to a close, I'm learning a few things about myself. Throughout college, I have not been a partier. I went to one frat party. It took me two years in my a cappella group to actually start going to their parties with any regularity (and I'm still an uncommon sight among them). This week, however, I apparently donned a new personality and spent both Tuesday and Thursday night partying how I never imagined I would. I went to my first bar and a boy I'm not dating bought me my first shot. I danced with strangers. I got an all-you-can-drink bracelet. I am retrospectively hating myself.
I don't get hangovers. A little dehydrated, sure. I do not sleep til noon and crawl out of bed with a headache the size of my regret and nurse coffee for the next three hours. Even so, I can feel that I'm not on my game and I hate the idea that I can't lose myself in fun unless I've had a few drinks. I also hate getting exciting news via text and being too disoriented to properly care about it.
I think there are just too many things happening at once. I start partying right before a bunch of my friends are graduating and the frustration with myself doubles the sadness and confusion of people disappearing from my life. I haven't actually hung out with my best friend in over two weeks (he doesn't drink and so did not join us for Tuesday and Thursday) and I hate ending my semester on this note. I'm going to go home for three months where my family antagonizes my veganism and everything is dirty all the time and I have to pretend that I haven't changed since high school so I can keep up with the mindless banter with the old friends who live in town. I get so accustomed to being free and totally myself here that it drives me nuts to go "home" and be someone else.
I am looking forward to being closer to Tristan, though. Long-distance, while feasible, is not something that either of us has particularly enjoyed and it'll be nice to be in the same area again. Admittedly, we'll still be 40-60 minutes apart, but that's better than 3-4 hours by a long shot. I just want to be like we were last fall when campus was warm and he was here and I got to live in my house and no one judged me for my choices and there was dancing and beach excursions and picnics and late nights watching Whose Line with the bff.
I know my life is easier than most, and I do appreciate the good in my life. I guess sometimes I just get tired of being the shoulder that's cried on and never getting to vent myself, you know?
I need to go before I whine too much more.
I need to get out.
Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Friday, May 6, 2011
Monday, January 24, 2011
Resentment, party of one.
I know this blog might lead you to think otherwise, but I'm not the sort of person who spends their whole like complaining about things. I keep the vast majority of the suck in my life bottled away. I mean, I don't want to deal with it so why should anyone else? This personality quirk (flaw?) has the potential to get me into trouble. It did just that earlier this evening.
As I mentioned over the weekend, I deal with SAD. So does, I believe, about 30% of the American population, so I'm in good company. Coupled with that is that I also have remnants of depression. I was diagnosed in middle school, went through medication and counseling, and found a way to keep it under control on my own, sans meds. This worked pretty well for the last bit of high school and the first bit of college. I don't know what it was that started setting me off again (stress, displacement, relationship, diet, whatever), but I began having trouble with it again about halfway through my sophomore year of college.
For those of you who also deal with this problem, you'll understand my dispair at having these troubles again after 3-4 years symptom free. You'll also understand the annoyance of hearing people who've never dealt with depression tell you they know how you feel, most especially when they compare your mental instability to stress of a paper they're working on. It doesn't quite work that way, folks.
When I'm in a depressive episode, I operate under a fog. Emotions feel less, food tastes less, words mean less, you get the idea. I've come to discover, though, that when an episode coincides with SAD, it turns into self-directed rage (at least for me). That's what happened when I made the painting in the most recent post.
There's a method of creating art called "Psychic Automatism," which is pretty much when you tell reason and logic to piss off and you just let your hands and your emotions do their own thing. This method was the groundwork for surrealism, though surrealism did in some cases evolve into a higher exploration of sensory confusion (think Dali). That vicious, nightmaring wolf is what came out of me when I let emotions run. This is something that frightens me and I don't know if I actually feel safe encouraging myself to continue this sort of thing. It's like looking at it proves that my mind is a little more on the dysfunctional side than I'd like.
This is the state I was in earlier today when my boyfriend told me he resents me for having all my friends around at college while he's away living with family he doesn't know terribly well and teaching at a school where he's the youngest in his department by a good 10-15 years.
Yes, I do have my friends around. That's about it. I've lost my passion and been forced into a major I don't really care about, I'm losing my sanity one day at a time, waking up in the morning makes me want to scream some days, I've cried myself to sleep every night for the past week, and I can't trust my own head to not create fantastical and horrifying images to torment me until I literally remove them from sight (and even afterwards to be honest). I'm sorry that you refuse to reach out to the other interns who you know from college for a little support or maybe drinks now and then, and I'm sorry that you feel like you're intruding at your uncle's house, but you have a job you love, and a pet to calm you down, and someone who asks how your day was and makes you dinner, and you never have to feel the kind of crushing loneliness that makes every part of you ache because you always have someone there.
You have no right to resent me for being unhappy 300 miles from you. Yours is not the only sad story.
As I mentioned over the weekend, I deal with SAD. So does, I believe, about 30% of the American population, so I'm in good company. Coupled with that is that I also have remnants of depression. I was diagnosed in middle school, went through medication and counseling, and found a way to keep it under control on my own, sans meds. This worked pretty well for the last bit of high school and the first bit of college. I don't know what it was that started setting me off again (stress, displacement, relationship, diet, whatever), but I began having trouble with it again about halfway through my sophomore year of college.
For those of you who also deal with this problem, you'll understand my dispair at having these troubles again after 3-4 years symptom free. You'll also understand the annoyance of hearing people who've never dealt with depression tell you they know how you feel, most especially when they compare your mental instability to stress of a paper they're working on. It doesn't quite work that way, folks.
When I'm in a depressive episode, I operate under a fog. Emotions feel less, food tastes less, words mean less, you get the idea. I've come to discover, though, that when an episode coincides with SAD, it turns into self-directed rage (at least for me). That's what happened when I made the painting in the most recent post.
There's a method of creating art called "Psychic Automatism," which is pretty much when you tell reason and logic to piss off and you just let your hands and your emotions do their own thing. This method was the groundwork for surrealism, though surrealism did in some cases evolve into a higher exploration of sensory confusion (think Dali). That vicious, nightmaring wolf is what came out of me when I let emotions run. This is something that frightens me and I don't know if I actually feel safe encouraging myself to continue this sort of thing. It's like looking at it proves that my mind is a little more on the dysfunctional side than I'd like.
This is the state I was in earlier today when my boyfriend told me he resents me for having all my friends around at college while he's away living with family he doesn't know terribly well and teaching at a school where he's the youngest in his department by a good 10-15 years.
Yes, I do have my friends around. That's about it. I've lost my passion and been forced into a major I don't really care about, I'm losing my sanity one day at a time, waking up in the morning makes me want to scream some days, I've cried myself to sleep every night for the past week, and I can't trust my own head to not create fantastical and horrifying images to torment me until I literally remove them from sight (and even afterwards to be honest). I'm sorry that you refuse to reach out to the other interns who you know from college for a little support or maybe drinks now and then, and I'm sorry that you feel like you're intruding at your uncle's house, but you have a job you love, and a pet to calm you down, and someone who asks how your day was and makes you dinner, and you never have to feel the kind of crushing loneliness that makes every part of you ache because you always have someone there.
You have no right to resent me for being unhappy 300 miles from you. Yours is not the only sad story.
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