Getting Unstuck

I rarely make a sincere post on here, but I would’ve wanted to read this if I saw it a couple months ago. So maybe it’ll help someone else who is desperate enough to turn to me, a non-expert regular sad person, for tips on dealing with a crippling bout of depression.

If you deal with depression regularly, you have probably had a few severe stretches where everything in your life falls apart and then swirls together to create a dark, muddled shit-storm which consumes weeks and months of your life and there’s no easy explanation or cure. I am just now recently coming out of such a shit-storm, and I wouldn’t wish that feeling on anybody. Everything was so fucking hard. If I was booked on a show, I pushed myself out of the house and mustered up all I could to just get on stage and get the job done so I could rush back to feel uncomfortable back at home. If I didn’t have to be somewhere, I wasn’t. I felt completely stuck, like I was exhausting myself just to tread water. I would end up angry-crying for hours on end. Not my proudest moment, and everything looked abysmal on several fronts. 

I say all this, not just to make me sound like a super chill confident stud, but also to be honest so that someone reading doesn’t think they’re fucked up in the head or something. You’d be amazed how low a chemically standard brain can stoop. You don’t need to assume you’ve “gone crazy” all of a sudden just because you reach some new low point during a meltdown. I know I wondered that, but it’s simply hard to see a damn thing when you’re at the bottom. I thought everyone was avoiding me because I was no fun to be around. It really sucks to rough this kind of shit out alone; and not just alone, but lonely. I was actively hating my life and myself for most of the day over a 6 week period, and goddamn does that make it hard to do anything else. 

I am sharing all this, not just to brag, but to let you bummed out doofuses out there know that you are not alone in experiencing this crippling depression shit. You don’t *deserve* to be miserable, even if you’ve made an ass of yourself and have driven people away. I know everyone tells you what you have to do and how you should be thinking, and of course it’s not even close to that easy. I mean, you can’t just skip out on the element of time here. You already know how hard it is to get out of bed, and everything else is exponentially harder. Your friends mean well, they are just not where you’re at and think you would rather be paralyzed by sadness than decide you’ve had enough. Don’t hate them for being ignorant about it. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you will get back to being your self. 

This isn’t some magical cure, but it helped bring me out of the worst of it and changed the way I saw myself and my relationships with others. This is not some proven thing or even a thing at all. This is literally what I decided to make a daily priority for myself…

Every day, I have the same two objectives to meet:

1. Keep myself above all things petty.

2. Do something nice for someone else.

I know, it sounds like a poster in a guidance counselor’s office. The thing is, it got me out of my head enough to become unstuck. Avoiding all pettiness sounds vague, but making that a priority helped me stop doubting myself and be the person that I want to associate with. I interacted with everyone keeping in mind that they could be struggling as bad as me. I made myself delete facebook posts that could make some people feel like shit, and then talked to people I had assumed were shitty and tried to just have empathy instead. I started making decisions based on what the highest road would be for me to take. It’s seriously not high concept at all, it’s more like baby steps toward liking yourself. Also, assessing every decision helps keep you busy. 

Now doing something nice for someone every single day is not always easy. I didn’t want to just give a homeless guy change and call it a day. I am forced to think about my friends and peers more and consider if there’s anything I can do or give to someone that would actually help them out. For example, I took care of a small fix I had put off for years on an extra laptop I had and gave it to a friend who didn’t have one and wouldn’t be able to spend that kind of money anytime soon. They didn’t ask for it, and they didn’t know why, but they appreciated it more than I ever could and have started writing more because of it. 

That doesn’t make me some great guy, but I can’t tell you how much better it feels to ignore the impulse to look out for yourself or protect your own interests. We are so hardwired to question altruism that being nice for no reason makes you look crazy. I feel like, at the least, it reminds people that it’s ok to do things for people without helping yourself, or even if you have to sacrifice some shit. I am used to struggling, so when I am the least bit flush, it really is no big deal to pick up a tab or pay for a cab, and especially knowing that feeling of being broke, having to throw in money, and then finding out that you *don’t* have to. It feels way better to just have money and not let money have you. It is so relieving to stop thinking about your depressing situation and make someone else’s better. It sounds like I’m just jerking myself off for doing something nice, and in a way I am, because at least I’m not balled up in a dark room feeling sorry for myself.

More importantly, this had made me realize the effect you really have on people. If you just want everyone to think you are so funny/cool/handsome/rich/whatever…even if you dedicate yourself to perpetuating that image and project that image as you interact with people, you will be known as “that (whatever) guy” by a few people who mention your identifying traits in passing to remind someone else that they’ve met you. That’s because we care more about making an impression via sales pitch instead of how we actually treat people. When someone knows you because you treated them better than anyone would expect, they won’t forget that, and even if they do; you are still better off. 

This, of course, is just the way that I have found to make a positive change in my life that is very doable and significant. I don’t know what I am doing, just trying to be my best self instead of being frozen, not knowing what my next move should be and regretting my past. 

I am not a depression success story or anything. I am literally weeks out of hopelessness, but it is a world of difference, and I hope maybe someone is reading this who needs to be and will end up benefiting from this: the something nice that I’m doing for someone else today.