I Feel Like Not Feeling

The thing about depression that is most crippling is its all-encompassing impression it gives me of myself.  It's likely not accurate, but in the world of mental illness, actual reality scarcely matters.  The impression's "reality" so easily trumps it.

There are countless people who, with the best of intentions, try to arm me with tools and resources to feel better, get better, be better.  Sometimes those tools are useful.  Often, they aren't.  Not because they don't work, but because I lack the strength to wield them.  That's "reality" number one.

What a curious paradox I am.  I am introverted as all hell, but the life of the party.  I'm a bubbly fountain of energy when I'm with my peers, but as soon as I close my door, I collapse into a quagmire of utterly hopeless despair.  I shower those around me with praise, but I can't silence the cold voice that howls judgment like a wintry blast through my soul day in and day out.  I act out love, friendship, joy, and excitement, but feel no warmth of any of it in the echo chamber of my heart. That's "reality" number two.

It's almost like I desperately seek the love and affirmation of others (that I cannot feel) because I am unable to create my own for myself (which is why I can't feel theirs when they give it).

These idiosyncrasies have made me an excellent student of human behaviour.  I am a person who has to act alive while feeling dead, and as such, the living people around me are my only reference point.  That's "reality" number three.

But how good an actor am I?

I think this is why there's a limit to how close people get to me.  I'm a mirage.  I look whole from a distance, but the closer you get, the more scars you see, and the more you understand that my "feelings" for you are imitated.

Not that I don't care at all.  My emotions are dead, but I can still acknowledge the familiarity of someone's presence in my life, and I can appreciate that familiarity, and understand that they do have an actual feeling of friendship (or love) toward me.

I envy that.

But I also understand that eventually, these people can get close enough that the mirage falls away, and they see that all this time, they've loved a loveless creature, capable of nothing more than an intellectual assent to their existence, a mathematical calculation of their value to my life, as well as a similar calculation behind the value I have to them, and therefore, a conscious, vested interest in continuing the relationship.

When you find out that the "love" you've been getting is as cold as that, it's easy to feel deceived or even betrayed.  But most of the time, they never get close enough to see behind that curtain, so I can keep even my closest friends in a place where they know I'm in a form of pain, they know my wounds are incurable, and they accept the hurting person that I am, offering their very real love, without ever knowing that my appreciation for them is only as complete as I am.

That's "reality" number four.

That's just a small part of my "reality".  Everyone else who is depressed has their own "reality".  There'll be a few common threads through it, which is why you see a lot of well-meaning and thoroughly irritating platitudes all over the internet that say things like "depression is the lie that you're not worth it" on a background of birds and rainbows with a flower.  They want me to feel better, get better, be better, remember?  It's fine.  I'm fine.