Depression?

Throughout the past few weeks, I have been a bit busier than usual. Two weeks ago, I put most of my energy into applying for an amazing position for the summer. The week before, I was away from home visiting my family, which ate up most of my time. And, for most of this week, I was busy preparing myself for some fairly tough exams.

However, when the obligations slow and you realize that you’ve been in bed for four hours watching others live their lives, the excuse, “I’m really, really busy,” no longer works. “I’m busy” becomes nothing more than an excuse for something else – laziness, procrastination, whatever you may call it.

Everybody may have some downtime, a period where there are fewer obligations, a time when the to-do list shortens. It’s nice to have some time off, too. It’s nice to have a few spare hours to surf the internet or watch a movie. Eventually, though, something comes up - we can't spend the entirety of our lives lulling about. 

But what happens when the time comes to get off the couch and take care of that next obligation, and you feel stuck? We may start lying to ourselves - "I'll just look at this one last link," or "I'll just watch one more episode." It eventually becomes a cycle - "Now that I've seen that episode, now I have to watch the next one!" or "That task really won't take me three hours, and I'll have plenty of extra time tomorrow." You promised yourself that you would start work at 7:00, and then 7:30, and soon enough, it's 9:30, you've been watching Desperate Housewives since 5:30, and you spent the five hours preceding that browsing r/askreddit links.

Or, at least, that's what happened to me.

Most of you probably slip up and do this every now and again. You procrastinate writing another chapter of your book or finishing that project. We all do it, and it's okay every now and again. But what happens when it gets out of hand?

I haven't done any work on The Night Life in over three weeks. My last real blog post was the Pi Day post on 3/14 (we're not counting the Norrgard/Blake guest post, because that was just a matter of copy-pasting from an email). I haven't even done any Twittering, not really (though I do check it now and again). My house is a mess, and I've told myself countless times that I would clean it "tomorrow" or "next weekend" - neither of which has happened so far.

The fact is, I know that I've had some form of depression for about 2.5 years. I'm not going to go into why or how it might have started around that time, though I will say that it is serious enough to probably warrent counselling. I don't know if it's serious enough to be diagnosed as anything truly serious, something other than a simple case of the moody blues. Though, the fact alone that it's lasted for as long as it has is probably a sign that it's a little more than just "feeling sad".

For some reason, though, this week has proven especially bad. Wednesday was the worst, and in fact, it was one of the worst days I've had in a long time. Without going into too much detail, I nearly broke things off with my boyfriend of three years because it seemed like what would be best for him. After all, how could such a kind, loving man want to stick around with somebody stupid, unattractive, lazy, messy, and of course, depressed, like me? Today, on the other hand, has definitely been the other "bad day" of this week, though no drastic, life-altering plans were almost put into effect.

I probably need to seek some kind of help, I know that. Like everything else, it will probably get pushed off to the side for awhile. But, for the first time in 2.5 years, I am starting to understand that this problem isn't likely to go away like I thought it would. Because even when I cleansed my life of the most problematic factors, my mood (unfortunately) did not change for the better like I thought it would.