It's 5:34 am.

My brain has woken me up and will not let me get back to sleep. So, I am going to use this time.

I know that, in a previous journal, I talked about being depressed.

Right now, I want to talk about what that REALLY means.

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For me, when depression hits, I withdraw from things.

I withdraw from being interactive with people. I withdraw from most things that I enjoy. I am not very creative (as evidenced by only one new story being posted here in several months).

I also keep people at a distance. I don't let them in, don't let them see what is going on.

sighs

I have always said, "When I get serious, people start to worry.," because I try to be happy and silly and light in my interactions with others. I put the brave, happy face on and soldier through because people expect that of me. People expect me to be the silly, light-hearted one.

When I am depressed, that becomes very hard to do. I still find a way, apparently...but it is hard.

At work, this depression leads to simply not caring. Not caring about my job...not caring if I KEEP my job...not caring about the people AT my job. It leads to taking the restraints off of my mouth and giving voice to a lot of the frustrations I feel. There have been times over the past few months where I am sure I have almost lost my job because of this...but I am not 100% sure this is all depression-based, as I do have a suck-all job.

Oddly, the one spot that does seem to see a boost is my video gaming. Video games, for me, have always been an escape/stress dump for me...so naturally, when I am depressed, you see a BIG increase in the time I spend playing video games. My recent Skyrim bender (over 80 hours logged over the past week) is a big indicator that I am not right.

I do not want medication for this, because I know that it doesn't last forever. But, if you look back on what I have written, you can see, as I have, that I apparently have been depressed for quite a while. Probably a good portion of the year, I would wager.

So...why?

There are a good number of reasons: stress (I have had a lot of things going on, most of which has been chronicled in these journals), work frustrations (oh, so many frustrations and feeling powerless to change things), seasonal, lack of social interaction, lack of physical activity, lack of progress on gender expression...lots of potential reasons.

However, this I want to make absolutely clear: NOT ONCE HAVE I THOUGHT ABOUT ENDING IT ALL. At no time have thoughts of suicide or ending everything passed through my head.

Because I know that, despite how rough these depressive episodes are, they will end. It sometimes is just very hard to ride out the storm...and, since I need all of my energy to get through that storm, other aspects of my life have their energy taken away and diverted to keeping myself afloat, or at the very least functional.

So there. That is what depression does to me. This was not easy to write...but essentially, my brain demanded that it get done.

Hopefully, now that it is written, I can make progress on getting over it for now.

R.A.