Addicted To Sadness

A while back, I heard someone say that they might be “addicted to their sadness” and it sounded ridiculous to me. However, the more I think about it, the less ridiculous it sounds to me. Right now, you’re probably thinking to yourself how ridiculous it sounds to you. I can try to explain, but I’m not very good at expressing my feelings.

At a young age, I learned that I had depression which seemed to get worse as I got older. Unless you experience it yourself, It’s difficult to explain to people why you feel down when you don’t even really know the reason yourself. It’s even worse when life hands you a series of traumas that weigh you down on top of the already heavy depression. After a while, people stop trying to listen and give up entirely. So as a result, my young mind connects to the idea that no one truly wants to hear what you have to say. They have their problems and I can’t possibly burden them with my own. So, I decided to bottle them up and just live with it.

For a time, that made me feel strong. It made me think that if I can carry this weight, then I can do anything. Of course, this simply isn’t true, as the weight I carry will eventually get too heavy. It always does. The underlying issue however, is that this pain, trauma, immense anxiety, and self-hatred has played such a heavy role in my identity over the years that deep down, I am crippled by fear of the idea of making any kind of step to overcome these tribulations. At this point, I don’t know who I am. I look in the mirror and I think to myself that I have never met this person before in my life.

Talking to anyone about these thoughts in my mind has become nearly impossible. Oftentimes, people will give me the same cliché responses that don’t truly help me. I can only hear “I’m so sorry, that must be hard” or “Things will get better” so many times. The ones which infuriate me the most are the “just get over it” or “other people have it worse” responses. Of course, there will always be people who have it worse or better than me, but I feel like this acknowledgment should not be an excuse to dismiss my trials and tribulations. Plus, depression is not something anyone can just “get over.” Depression can be worked through but sometimes it’s hard when the only thing that I can think about is how much I hate myself and how much I want to die.

Eventually, just talking to people becomes too hard, but I don’t want them to leave me because “I’m too sad all the time.” So, I turn my sadness into a sense of humor just so people can say “he seems sad all the time, but hey, at least he’s funny.” This of course leads me to flock to others who do the same thing because now people relate to me, which in some weird and dysfunctional way, feels as close to closure as I'll probably ever get. The problem now is that having a real conversation about my broken mental health just doesn’t feel right if it’s not the punchline of a joke. But because all of us have found some sliver of joy when making these jokes, my emotions just become confused. So being this emotionally unhealthy person causes me to eventually become numb and unable to express true emotion. Everything I feel doesn’t seem real except for sadness and pain.

So now I’ve grown into this borderline unstable, unfeeling machine of a person who relies on emotionally devastating media to make me feel something. Even when writing this piece now, my mind has naturally repressed all the emotion I was feeling and I’ve lost my train of thought on the point. But it’s a part of who I am and there is no getting rid of my mental illnesses. Although I know that speaking with a professional could help me work through my traumas and hopefully become emotionally healthy, the fact that all of this is a part of who I am, scares me of the person I may become on the other side of that journey. It could be true that I am just a no-good person. It could also be true that I become someone new. But the Stockholm Syndrome I’ve developed for my crushing mental health is just too comfortable. All I can do is take it one day at a time. I know it’s going to be a long, arduous journey, but maybe tomorrow I can take that first step. If not, I’ll try again the next day.