I’ve been more depressed than usual for a while now. I don’t know if my antidepressants stopped working or if, maybe, I would be worse off without them. It fades sometimes, for hours or an afternoon or an evening, which makes me think they’re still working, but it always comes back. Maybe my meds are less effective than they used to be. Maybe I’m more depressed than I used to be. The latter stands to reason, given the way the world is going, but the former is an unanswerable question so it is where my mind dwells. I do not know how I’d even begin to figure that out. I doubt that there’s a blood test of some kind my doctor could perform that would tell me and while I expect there is some way of figuring it out via brain chemicals, the actual process of testing my brain chemicals seems like it’s not the sort of thing you do to figure out if your antidepressant’s effect is weakening. And it’s not like I can ask my therapist if I seem more depressed than usual. Of course I seem more depressed than usual! Have you looked outside? Have you follow any amount of news? Why WOULDN’T I feel depressed with all that going on? I can’t even say it’s probably both because either one could have this effect on me by itself! So all I can do is wonder while I interrogate my feelings and continue getting the same “I’m too tired to feel anything” response no matter what.

It’s not great. I feel like it’s slowly consuming me in a way I haven’t felt in almost a decade. I feel like I am sinking into a familiar quagmire after finally feeling like I was free of it and I do not care for this sensation. It has been a long time since my depression was this persistent, this pervasive, and I have no idea what to do about it this time. I’m out of things to change that won’t take more effort than I can spare at the moment. My life situation isn’t going to change for the better any time soon. Yes, things aren’t as bad as they could be and I am making the same, slow-but-steady forward progress I’ve been making for years, but that is small consolation when I feel like whatever light I had within me is guttering and at risk of going out. Which sounds much more dramatic than I mean it or am experiencing it. It is not a swift thing, threatening to extinguish me. It is a slow, steady thing of something maybe just burning out entirely. Which is an apt choice of words, considering this seems most closely tied to my burnout. After all, the only thing that has really changed in and about me is the severity of my burnout. Everything else is external and while that sure doesn’t help, it also doesn’t weigh as heavily on me, though maybe I’m just trying to fool myself about that one since, well, everything going on does admittedly weigh pretty heavily on me.

It definitely doesn’t help that my day job has been a monotonous drain the last few weeks as I’ve been performing the same test for weeks now, sometimes with tiny variations but often times out any change. It is grating, loud, tiring, and is reminding me of the nerve issues I had over a year ago thanks to the repetitive motions I was doing for my testing. It wears on you, doing the same thing over and over again, day after day, with very little hope of anything changing because it just takes so long to test that it will be weeks before you can even begin to hope to predict the outcome of the latest changes. I am mired down in exhaustion, repetition, the failures of society, and my own brain chemistry pickling my mind in feel-bad-juice. How am I supposed to get anything but brief moments of relief and joy when I return to this same crap day in and day out. There’s no where to go that’s free of any of it because I carry it with me wherever I go. Grocery prices are climbing even as the size of what you’re buying is shrinking (I used to not be able to fit a large bottle of hot sauce in my cabinet and now, suddenly, it fits), gas prices are just steadily climbing upward and I will think grocieries were cheap when all of that finally starts to hit food prices because it’s so much more expensive to move things around the country now. In the light of all that, what else can I do but struggle to avoid drowning in it?

I probably need to get out more. I probably need more sunlight and warmth and time around people who aren’t my coworkers. Fresh air and sunshine and the wind in the trees… An escape for my physical self, not just my intangible self. It’s been a couple years since I last got away like that and that trip was marred by severe back pain and, well, 2024 being 2024. None of that will fix things, but they would hopefully be enough to break through the miasma of insensate void dampening all of my emotional responses to thing. Honestly, if I wasn’t as focused on actually feeling my feelings as I have been these last few years, I’d probably feel pretty dang numb. It’s taking a lot of work to feel much of anything except tired and worn down. Which isn’t exactly helping the “feeling tired” thing. Even when I sleep enough, I still feel tired and worn out before long since I’m just barely treading water in the combined seas of my financial needs and my burnout. Even when I want to do stuff, it’s such a struggle to push myself to move and do it. If I could do whatever I wanted, I’d probably just lay down and not move for a few days. Not even in bed. On the ground. Just… wherever. It’s saying a lot when even the act of standing feels like it is draining the life out of my soul. What am I supposed to do about that? Or being too tired to get ready for bed? No easy solutions here. Just… more carrying on, I guess. What else is there to do?