I have spent pretty much my entire life dealing with depression and anxiety. I don’t remember a single time in my life that I wasn’t anxious (and I can remember back pretty early into my life) and the depression has been a constant companion since I was five or six. I developed tools to cope as a child, improved them in order to survive as a pre-teen and teen, worked to solidify them as a young adult, and then worked to heal in my twenties. I haven’t really struggled with them in almost a decade, since my mid-twenties, because I got so good at handling them that it took very little effort, at least as far as my day-to-day energy was concerned. Some days were worse, some were better, but I mostly averaged out to being fine. These days, though, that is no longer the case. Ever since last year, when I started the medication that would go on to cause me a great deal of constant pain, I’ve been fighting to keep an even keel again, in a way I haven’t had to since I left my parents’ house in 2009. Part of that is the accumulation of stress over the past five years of Covid-19’s domination of existence, a lot of that was the stress from being in constant pain, and the rest has been the gradual turn towards shitty fascism that has been really taking center stage in the US. There’s just been so much to feel stressed and depressed about and so very little I’ve been able to rely on to counteract those feelings that I’ve just had to make some kind of peace with living in this state of perpetual exhaustion, depression, stress, and anxiety.

These days, even without the constant pain, I’m struggling with feeling exhausted all the time thanks to another medication and that’s certainly not helping. The biggest contributing factor to me feeling depressed is me also feeling tired and exhausted, so it’s really been a return to how awful I felt while on that other medication. Just, you know, a different flavor of awful. I am doing my best to get through this rough patch, since I am trying to find an antidepressant medication that will work for me and I know that it can take a few months to get through trying on before you start the process over with something new (assuming the one you were trying didn’t work, as this one does not seem to be doing). It just sucks to go from starting to feel better, enough so that I’m finally in a place where I thought I could handle whatever an antidepressant might through, to feeling just as bad because I’m tired all the time or dealing with the worsening-mood side effects of changing my dose. Plus, there’s no guarantee that this medication will even work at all and the particular slew of side-effects I’m dealing with are making me feel like whatever benefit I might get won’t be worth it. I mean, I’ve never been the best at getting enough sleep and now, even on the nights I get a decent/good amount of sleep, I’m constantly dozing off any time I sit down. It reminds me of an ex of mine, who had narcolepsy, and how she’d fall asleep any time she stopped moving in the evening, once her medication started to wear off for the day.

I don’t like feeling so put-upon and low-energy no matter what I do. I’ve even had to increase my caffeine intake just to cope with how tired I am. I can’t afford to completely zone out or fall asleep all the time. I’ve got stuff to do. Like, you know, my job. And my blog posts, which are the one thing that keeps not getting done because they are not essential to my day-to-day life work and rest are. They’re just important to my emotional well-being and sense of fulfilment, which is why I’m writing this at three in the afternoon on the Monday it was supposed to go up since all the time I had dedicated to writing over the weekend ended up with me dozing off at my computer or just not being able to get out of bed in the morning because I struggled to wake fully up for over an hour. I really, genuinely hate feeling like this and it really doesn’t seem to be improving at all one it’s own. The only change came when I reduced my dose of antidepressant and that has barely qualified as an improvement since my mood also worsened in response to the change in medication. I’ve got another couple weeks of this before I’ve hit the end of my “just try it out” period and I genuinely do not believe it will improve in that time. I’ve been tired and sleepy for almost three months now and I’m so ready to feel literally any kind of way ever. I even spent a week getting so much sleep (for me) and I STILL felt tired enough to fall asleep at any moment. It sucks.

I don’t know what’s next. I don’t know how my anxiety and depression are going to respond to the actually horrible, depressing-and-anxiety-inducing stuff happening in the world, let alone how they’re respond to my attempt to mess with my brain chemistry in order to make my own existence more tolerable. I mean, the only reason I’m able to handle this current moment in time is because I’ve been preparing for US society to change the ways it has been since mid-2022 and I’ve been spending all of my free time escaping into video games, TV shows, and books so that I don’t have to think about how awful life is getting for pretty much everyone who isn’t rich, an asshole, or a petty cisgender white man. I need something to actually work out for me so I can stop fighting this crap across every aspect of my life other than my escapist fantasies. I mean, I literally ended an exciting Dungeons and Dragons campaign I’ve wanted to do for most of a decade because it wasn’t a distant-enough escape, just to REALLY put it all in perspective for you. I am in desperate need of relief and I can’t afford to take any more vacation days (monetarily, sure, but also at work because things that need doing are piling up too much). It just really sucks that my desperation and anxiety these days are a mixture of a reasonable reaction to the world around me and a desperate need to stop feeling so awful as a result of every single difficult-but-important life-improvement intervention I attempt. Really sucks to know I’m putting myself through at least part of this because I’m trying to improve things for myself and could probably get back that little bit of slack that I had if I just gave up on trying to improve my life in any measurable way.