I had a long chat with Mom yesterday. I told her about how I feel so blah, not just lately, but since I was born. All she had to say was that I should take antidepressants, but I brushed that off like I always do. Antidepressants have only been around since 1988 (well, at least that was when Prozac was introduced), and supposedly they are a miracle of modern medicine, different from tranquilizers and other drugs from the past, but I think if Mom and I had had this conversation before the birth of Prozac she would be telling me to take a Valium.
I don't think my problem can be "fixed" with a pill. I can't totally change my personality. I am an anxious person, I admit it. I overthink everything in my life, to the nth degree. She just cannot understand that because she is not like that. Same thing with the shrink I went to earlier this year. It takes one to know one. My dad probably understands it better, but I don't feel like talking to him since I told him that he couldn't fix my car.
I hate to feel like a crybaby, a martyr, a psychological mess. I feel like my parents are trying to help me because they think I need to be babied and told that this isn't my fault, when maybe it is. I wish they would say to me, "Snap the hell out of it," but that will never happen.
I hate to give in to this. I hate to say to my mom that I feel horrible. I wish I could lock myself up in my room and read self-help books until I felt better about myself. Right now I keep my feelings bottled up until I am ready to explode and/or sob my eyes out in front of my computer. Before that I would eat until I could forget to think about it. Did you know that rats will eat Crisco right from the can, and that a sheep will literally eat itself to death if you let it? I like to think I'm more refined than a sheep but in actuality no, when you look at all the stupid things I've done, I turn out to be the fattest, stupidest sheep of all.
I think the term "depressed" for me is different than it is for everybody else. This is my natural state, like the way some people are born with a naturally higher body temperature, 99.0 F instead 98.6 F. And right now I'm depressed in the usual way, the way I have been since I can remember. It seems I have been in a state of crisis since I was 9 years old! I would cry to my parents every night when I started middle school. I finally stopped crying about it, but ever since depression has kind of been this low hum in my life, varying in intensity, all through high school, all through college, up to where I am right now. Every once in a while, someone I know will tell me that I look sad or ask me why I'm so quiet. Do I really look that way to the world? I still feel depressed, but I try to be dead to it rather than indulge it.