I want my life back

The fifth of October, 2019. I’m still awake since yesterday. Only one year has passed since my graduation from college. It feels like a long long time ago!.. It’s 4:30 AM, I should be sleeping, but instead I’m binge-blogging. It’s a way for me to be away from Facebook.

I’ve been using Facebook since 2008. In this year I was graduating high school. After graduating I traveled to another city to study Engineering. I was living in a dorm, so I had no TV, and no smartphones or internet. My only connection to the outside world was going to a near cyber cafe and opening Facebook. At that time began my addiction to Facebook. There’s something very relaxing about writing and posting!

Now I’m taking it to WordPress, it gives me the posting feature, but with much less of the noise in the background. I can write where no one is following me. Where I just talk to myself, about myself!

The first year at college went great, I got myself a couple of As and Bs, and was very proud of myself.. I only got one F at the Physics B course. I was going to specialize in Mechatronics Engineering. I’ve always wanted to be great at something special! Mechatronics department sounded like something a few people knew of at the time. I wanted to be great, that’s all. I was 16 when I chose this field. How is a 16 years old supposed to choose what he wants to do with life?! I wonder about that now.. There something inherently wrong with a world that expects teenagers to find their specialty at age 16 or 17. You might find a kid this age who has found his or her passion in life, but is it the average, or is the world forcing kids to take huge decisions about life at an early age?

For me it was hard to choose, but that wasn’t the problem, I enjoyed Engineering and I could’ve easily passed my exams, maybe with an F here and an F there, but I’d have finished it. It was due to major depression that I gradually became numb! So numb that I didn’t want to go to college anymore! I tried to fight it, but it just got the best of me! I didn’t learn that I had depression until 2010 probably; two years after graduating high school, and three years before dropping out of college. It was a painful experience.. painful and frustrating; especially that my depression was just like having diabetes; it’s just a chronic condition, there’s nothing I can do about it except to cope!

I remember the day I walked to my therapist, and I didn’t know yet what was wrong with me, and she told me that what I had was “depressive tendencies”, it was such a nice word for the severe level of depression that I discovered I had! Depression is one of the hardest illnesses to beat! It was a long, long road, and I’m still fighting.

The problem with the depression was trying to find a meaning to all of it; you feel that it’s completely pointless, this sickness that is robbing you of your life one day at a time! You keep watching the days as they flow away from you, day after day! The days then turn to weeks and the weeks turn to months and the months to years, the more time passes by, the more you feel stuck in this condition, stuck in this place.

It’s especially sad when you find people taking waking up in the morning with energy for granted, when you absolutely have zero energy to do anything. Depression interferes with your reward/motivation mechanism, you stop feeling the motivation to do, or the pleasure from doing, absolutely anything.

I reach a point where I’m just extremely angry at God for doing that to me, I lose my belief in religion and in god and become like a nihilist atheist with no sense of purpose or meaning.

At a point in 2016, I took a decision not to make any change in my ideology and philosophy anymore; because it was all stemming from the depression, and the depression wasn’t real. It was real in a sense that I felt it, but in the way it made me see the world through it’s extremely dark glasses it was a distortion of reality, and a very unhelpful one!

Here I defined my main battle: Overcoming, or coping with, the depression. It wasn’t about philosophy or religion anymore, it wasn’t about abstract thoughts about morality, ethics, meaning and purpose. It was my own inner experience, I decided to use a tool from psychology instead of philosophy: cognitive behavioral techniques.

It took me many years after my life has been destroyed back and forth time after time after time to get up again, for the billionth time, to try to start all over again.

I traced back my depression to 11 years old, so now it has been 17 years. I want to overcome it. And that’s my main goal.

I want my life back, and I will get it.