Content Warning: I’m pretty depressed right now. I’m not, like, despairing or anything, but I’m pretty miserable and this post is about that. Best avoid it if you’re not up for reading about someone else’s experiences with depression.

I’ve been struggling with my depression more than usual, lately. I would love to be able to point to the fact that there’s been less sunlight lately and that what sunlight there has been has appeared during cold, windy days where the wind chill takes the temperature below negative twenty degrees fahrenheit, the temperature at which it becomes unsafe for me to go on my usual walks unless I can somehow cover every inch of my skin. Frostbite is no joke and I’ve avoided going for my usual walks outside every day for the past two weeks since it has either been physically dangerous due to the cold or the weather has left my usual path in a state that makes it also physically unsafe due to slipping hazards. Instead, I’ve been walking around the building I work in and that, coupled with the more intense physical labor I’ve had to during this two-week period, has met my exercise needs that my walk usually meets. However, I’m not getting enough sunlight and I can’t find my old SAD lamps. If the lack of my usual sunlight and daily walk where the cause of my worsening depression, it it would be easy to fix. The problem is, I’ve also had a pair of super busy, stressful weeks at work, I haven’t had much time or energy for socializing, we’re entering the “late January in winter so you feel miserable” period of the year, and I had to deal with a leak in my apartment (which has really damaged the comfort I’d been feeling in this apartment, since it brought me right back to the problems I’d thought I’d escaped after moving away from my last apartment). There’s a lot going on and none of it is great.

Now, to be fair, I’m a lot better off than I was this time last year as I simultaneously faced the loss of my favorite hobby during the time I was doing family therapy with my parents and needed that hobby, along with the escapism it provided, to cope with said family therapy and the disintegration of some of my friendships (some of which involve said hobby to the degree that I was kind of glad it had fallen apart so at least I didn’t feel like I’d lost more than just the friends all at once). Unfortunately, that doesn’t do anything to help me today, especially when my head hurts from gouging the skin on my forehead at work while trying to make some changes to a server system we use for testing. It is very easy to feel miserable about myself and my life right now and I’ve been struggling to come up with reasons to feel something other than mounting misery. I’ve done my best to stay busy, I’ve allowed myself the breaks I felt I needed, I’ve tried to come up with a plan for next week to allay some of the “impending work” stress I’m experiencing, and I’ve even tried a bit of journaling (in haiku form and in my pjhysical journal I haven’t used much in years), but nothing has helped. I don’t really have any concrete reason to feel bad other than my general stress, misfortune, and brain chemicals to pin this wave of depression on so I can feel like its solvable. I can’t even think of something that’s actively bothering me beyond the sheer exhaustion of it all and while that has been enough to send me on a depressive spiral in the past, this one feels different. The weight of it is wrong. And, tired as I am, I haven’t had any of the mentally cloudy days that always accompany the level of exhaustion required to send me spiraling into the depths of my depression.

I can’t even just shake it off or let it roll off me like I usually do. I get no response from myself when I tell myself that its a temporary affair and that, evetually, my mood will rise again. Plus, it’s not like I’m feeling particularly bleak or hopeless like the worst episodes of my depression. I just feel sad and tired with a thin layer of miserable to bind it all together. There’s no dark thoughts whirling around the edges of my spiral, hemming me in as I work to avoid them. I’m not strolling down memory lane as I go on a tour of every mistake I’ve ever made. I’m not even dwelling on all the people I used to care for that I’ve had to remove from my life, or even the one who seems to have removed me from her life. I mean, I’m thinking about them now, but I wasn’t before. Before, I was just sad. I wasn’t up for talking to my coworkers and even wore my mask more than usual to avoid needing to put on something other than the neutral or sad expression that my face is currently defaulting to. I just feel bad.

My goals for this weekend are to find my SAD lamp and put it next to the tablet I’m using to watch Dimension20 so I can bask, watch, and play whatever dumb video game catches my attention, which probably means Tears of the Kingdom even though I keep telling myself that I should go back into Armored Core VI since I was really enjoying that before the missile lock-on noise wouldn’t stop ringing through my head when I was trying to sleep. I honestly don’t have a lot of willpower to push myself to do anything these days and that’s probably a part of it, too. There’s only so long you can feel yourself dragged through your days and evenings by the simple inertia of your life before you come to a halt. Hopefully a weekend of rest, sleep, and my Sunday game of Heart: The City Beneath, will help me recover from whatever parts of this are due to exhaustion and burnout.