Having depression or anxiety can be quite awful an experience, each on their own. But to live with both these extremely contradictory mental health conditions simultaneously, paralyses your life. Two polar opposite voices live inside your head when these two conditions come together. Your life basically turns into a vicious, never ending cycle of confusion. It’s incredibly frustrating for me, so, to explain it to others, who often cannot comprehend them, can be daunting. I can’t ask for extra lemons in the office canteen because I am scared of being scolded. I cannot ask my boss for a day off even if I feel unwell because I am scared she’ll think I am lazy. I cannot say what I really think or feel because I live in a perpetual state of fear about the consequences of relatively inconsequential things. Not being able to do actually speak my mind out of fear, also creates a lot of anxiety and depression, furthering this cycle of negativity. Here’s the chaos of what a typical day in my life comes with.
All activities seem daunting.
Depression and anxiety fill you with worry about pending tasks, but also make your procrastinate. You know you need to pay your bills on time, but you’re so full of worry about how expensive the bill will be, how your card might be blocked, or that you will have to pay a late fine if you pay it, that you’d rather do it later.
So, a simple task seems daunting because my anxiety-ridden imagination provides a billion possible ways things could go wrong. It tells me: “Even if you do this task, you will do it so poorly that it will ruin your life in some way or the other.” So, I end up doing nothing, making no progress, and escape by watching a T.V show.
The mental exhaustion is so crippling that I sometimes find it tough to get out of bed.
There is a reason people with mental illness sleep so much, and are constantly tired. For me, it is because of heightened mental activity, which makes my mind race till it is brought to a screeching halt by sheer exhaustion. I stay up all night, worrying. In the morning, I can’t wake up because I am too scared of doing all the things I worried about last night.
In fact, one of the symptoms of depression is a complete lack of interest in doing routine tasks like cleaning, bathing, eating, or driving. People who don’t suffer from mental illnesses treat these tasks normally, and don’t feel nauseated thinking of finishing them.
To a depressed person like me, it seems mountainous. The idea of doing the same thing every day, only to have to do it again tomorrow, makes many people with depression, including me, lose the will to live.
To add to that, my anxiety makes me worry about what will happen if I don’t bathe and if someone comments on how dirty I will look. I worry about rats crawling around my room if I don’t clean. All of this goes through my head before I’ve even stepped out of bed, exhausting me before the day has even begun. Hence, when depression tells me, “Stay in bed,” anxiety nags me with all the bad things that could happen if I do stay in bed.
Change is harrowing.
Since everyday life doesn’t come with the prospect of something exciting or new, most days are full of mundane tasks. So, I often feel a dull detachment to life, thinking to myself: “Why isn’t something happy or fun happening so that I can feel nice?”
The answer lies in my crippling anxiety, which fills me up with dread about the consequences of change, which I’m not exactly welcoming of. That is why, when the prospect of something new presents itself, I am too terrified to embrace it. Allow me to explain. This is where my mind goes if a friend asks me to go dancing on a Saturday night.
Me: “If we go dancing that means I need to dress up. That means I need to wear spanx or lose weight. That means I need to wash my spanx. That also means I need to wax my legs, which will hurt so much and cost me money. Wait, I also need to spend money to buy alcohol. If I buy alcohol I will be broke. I have to take a cab there and that will also make me broke. If I take a cab late at night, I might be murdered.”
So, I cancel with vague excuses. My mind thinks of INSANE negative outcomes to any change in routine. Each possibility attached to any activity, hisses at me like a scary snake, threatening to bite my head off. Imagine having that web of snake heads wrapped around your mind, choking it of peace at all times.
It’s a cross between feeling nothing and feeling everything.
A lot of medication, allows me to carry on with life, have a job, and get out of bed every day with a mask of “I’m fine” always at my disposal. This dulls my brain’s reactions to situations. So, I often don’t feel happy or sad. I feel nothing. That is the best case scenario for a depressed person like me, IF I did not have anxiety. In reality, though, one part of my brain is constantly putting down the other because these two diseases don’t co-exist harmoniously.
Here are some conversations my mind has with itself:
Anxiety: If I don’t tell him I love him, he will date someone else.
Depression: But he won’t like me anyway because I suck. If I tell him (and he rejects me) I’ll just feel worse.
Anxiety: But he might tell me he likes me.
Depression: Good things don’t happen to me, though. So he won’t.
Anxiety: That’s true. I’m fat, loud, and my skin is terrible. If I don’t work on myself, nothing good will happen.
Depression: Remember that time you were thin, sweet, and acne-free? He still dumped you, then. Good things will never happen.
