Really Real Mental Health Post

TW: Mention of Suicidal Thoughts, but not current suicidal thoughts.

Yesterday I spent a good part of the day really really fucking depressed.

Like, that pit of nothingness where I’m not even sad, I just feel complete apathy.

I ended up in bed, set up the TV and watched a few hours of shows.  That’s actually a pretty good sign of how black the pit was because I don’t watch TV, at all, most of the time.  It’s just not something I’m interested in normally.  TV is a depression activity for me and I haven’t turned the TV in the bedroom on in close to a year.

At one point I made the comment to Wonder Woman.

“I’m horribly depressed, but I’m not suicidal, and I’ll take this, I can live with this.”

This sucks, in a horrible way.  Like, I’d love to climb back out of this and find my joy again.  I don’t want to be dreading getting out of bed the moment I open my eyes but that’s so much better than dreading the fact that I’m even alive.

I feel like I can “one foot in front of the other” my way through this.  Slowly, through quicksand and sludge, and sometimes pulling those feet along with both hands, but I feel like I have a chance.

I don’t feel like making a wrong decision in self care will mean I’m dead.

I can let my guard down.

A wrong decision won’t kill me.  That’s a really big thing.

When I’m depressed and suicidal, I feel like every decision I make has to be the right one.  If I give into the depression in the wrong way, am I leading myself down the path to death.

I can’t actually run away from depression, I can’t decide to not be depressed and no amount of self care is going to fix depression even if some decisions are better than others.

The amount of stress I’m under to “get it right” when I add suicidal thoughts to the mix, is so extreme, that the stress makes it worse.

This time I can just relax and be depressed, as strange as that sounds.  It doesn’t mean I’m not trying to do the right things to get better.  But I don’t have to worry about doing the right thing 100% of the time because it won’t kill me if I decide to lay down and watch TV for 3 hours.

And honestly, afterwards, I felt a bit better, even if my back hurt more from laying around too much.

I still end up laying around when I’m suicidal, but without the benefit of things like TV to distract me, because I’m afraid that turning on the TV is giving in and leading to death, but instead I end up frozen in bed because of my fear.

Hopefully I can take some lessons from this, and the next time I’m suicidal (chances are, it will happen again, it’s the nature of my illness), I can cut myself some slack and not be so afraid to relax.  The depression will run it’s course, suicidal thoughts or not.

This time I’m just glad I’m not suicidal.