I'm in a bad place right now.

[the frog in the fog]

You ever walk around and then all of a sudden just feel like sitting or lying down somewhere on the side? I've been lying down on various places around the city these past few weeks, maybe months. I walk around, go from one end to the other with public transport, sit in cafes, sit and lie down on the ground, on benches, aimlessly. I'm a vagabond.

I don't go to my university classes anymore. I don't participate in the group project, I don't hand in papers.

Since I was 13, I've always had low points like this in my life, crying weeks on end, even wanting to kill myself. This time, atleast I know I want to live. Even though it's really, really hard and I'm close to giving up.

I'm where I want to be in life. I'm in my dream city, doing my dream studies, having nice people around me.

It started getting worse three weeks ago, when I had multiple exams right behind me. All of the exams went really well. But now my energy is just gone. I can't do anything that requires an effort.

Which is why I've been walking and driving around like a vagabond. I've also been going out with friends, had cigarettes and alcohol. I've been reading, writing, watching movies and series.

But now I don't want to anymore. I'm sitting on a cafe again, I'm not hungry, I don't want to be sitting around in my apartment again. Everything is so impossibly loud, my ears and my head hurt, and this world is just too much, I feel like walking around with a blindfold, I put on my hood which helps.

I was supposed to, or thought I was supposed to, meet a therapist today, but turns out it's next week. I've been waiting for a week, I can't wait another, I don't know what to do. I don't feel like distracting myself with trips and books and alcohol anymore. But also I can't go to uni nor just hang around and sleep all day. Everything is too much.

My mother is coming to visit next week. I've been pretending that everything is going well to my family. I don't want her to find out the truth when she comes and I don't know how to hide it, nor talk to her about it.

 

[saturnv]

What you wrote is really relatable to me. Sometimes when I am down I try to imagine the worst case scenario and see if I could be ok with it. What happened to me when I was like this is that I failed all my classes and had to return to attempt college again years later. It seemed like it was the end of the world at the time, but the good news is it really wasn't.

Have you reached out to your instructors and/or classmates to let them know you are having a bad time? They might be sympathetic. If you are like me, it will only get harder to do that as time goes on. I never managed to do it before it was too late.

I hope you get to feeling better soon. I believe in you.

 

[Judge]

Sounds similar to the ebbing and flowing of my clinical depression. Though you need to seek the help of a physician to be sure. Something that has haunted my life since my teenaged years. When life is a continuous and disorienting flow back and forth between everything that matters and none of it mattering at all.

Life coming down to only "peaks and valleys". Reflecting times when I should feel exalted, yet it's usually when my depression begins to cycle back. Keeping me from enjoying things and even the people I loved. For me it's precisely that "bad place" you describe.

In 1982 I was formally diagnosed with chronic clinical depression, social anxiety and OCD. A time when medical professionals were only beginning to understand neurological conditions such as "Asperger's Syndrome", which would later be acknowledged and revised to "Autism Spectrum Disorder" in 2013. All well-known and potential comorbid conditions to autism.

To this day, about the only way I can really sense a transition between those "peaks and valleys" of my life, is when I rapidly lose interest in things that matter the most to me. When all I can really do is to "buckle up and hang on" until it cycles out as if it had a mind of its own. And when necessary and able, to live life not much further into the future than in 24 hour increments. Trying to deliberately not look beyond the horizon so to keep it all as simple as you can when you're not at your best and you know it.