So, there I was smiling like a maniac after realizing I was experiencing a lot of the symptoms of depression.
Why?
I’ll get to that.
First a little explanation as to why I was depressed and how I got to this place. After all I am the “Happiness Guy”, shouldn’t I know better? Should I have been able to prevent this?
The short answer is yes.
The long answer is, life is not always that straight forward. Even though I had recently rediscovered or accepted that my calling was to be a writer and was enjoying delving much more into that, there was still roughly three years of minor stresses that had built up before that from various sources and the whole twenty years of denying my passion to myself which probably had put some kinks in my ability to feel as happy as I’d want. Sorry, that was a long sentence.
Anyway, to boil it down, I think I had enough “junk” in my thoughts and in my life built up over the last three years (this last year in particular) that even though I had a spike of joy from accepting my passion and working on it, there had been enough underlying “stress” in my life such that if there were any major incidents, I might just fall into depression.
So guess what happened … well it wasn’t a major incident, but there was a series of moderate ones and I did not cope well. The culmination of these incidents was the week where my phone and computer died (my phone just needed a new battery, but my computer was well and truly fried). I did not handle these well. Sure I may have looked fine on the surface, but I was feeling a big hunk of anger and anxiety and frustration below the surface which was dragging me down…a lot. I was becoming more and more irritable and tense.
I didn’t think it was depression, though. I thought it was stress and anger and such, but not depression. Then, just today, I went over my own research on depression and guess what I found? Below are a few excerpts from my depression research:
Symptoms:
- May feel tense or irritable instead
- Having little energy and feeling fatigued much of the time
- Having trouble sleeping
- Men are more likely to feel angry and discouraged instead of hopeless and helpless
Guess what…that hit my experience right on the head. I have been very angry and irritable and discourage this past week in particular. Additionally I’d been having so much trouble with sleeping and fatigue recently that I’d gone to a sleep clinic and guess what they found? I was sleeping just fine, but my brain wasn’t, it was getting up several times a night (without me waking up) because it was too active (often because of stress and anxiety).
I’d been wondering for AGES what was wrong with my sleep and why I was so tired. I had been sleeping more and more just to feel rested.
When I did go over my depression info and realized I am most likely suffering from minor to moderate subsyndromal depression well that explained a lot of what had been happening in my life recently including the whole sleep thing!
So there I was, smiling, as a learned I was most likely depressed (still not confirmed by a professional yet, I should note) BECAUSE it made a whole bunch of the other things in my life start to make sense!
It’s like having a bunch of symptoms and knowing you’re sick without knowing what disease you actually have. Then, when you do find out, even though having that disease sucks, at least now you know what you have and can do something about it.
So there you go.
I am most likely mildly to moderately depressed and I couldn’t be happier about it. That is the oddity that is me. Don’t you love the little quirks in life!
Rob