recently: depressed, still job-hunting, home suddenly uncertain
icon: "tenebrous (a shadowy orange-light photo of my face, looking down, with an achingly sad expression)"
So, I guess I put off the depression as long as I could. About three weeks ago I stopped being able to fend it off. I've been completely overwhelmed.
Illustrations from recent tweets:
Aug 24: Been in a weird, uncomfortable mindspace for days. Feel incapable of expression, basic functions are a struggle.
Aug 28: Tired of loss. Tired of lack. Tired of such tiny glimpses. Tired of trying to scrape together hope. Tired of peeling caked shit off my joy.
Aug 31: I need something joyful to anticipate. I don't have anything right now & can't imagine a way forward. Depression is up to my knees & rising.
Sept 5:
this scrawny sapling
dropped its leaves, bowing to drought
yet, roots keep stretching
my puny branches
empty, dried stiff, so fragile
ache, waiting for rain
Sept 9: [TW/CN: depression, suicidal thoughts]
-- TW/CN: depression, suicidal thoughts -- I feel helpless in the face of so much evil and ready to give up. I need to protect the land, the trees, the people, and I can't. This world is just going to get worse and worse no matter what. I hate everything. I'm so tired of keeping on living in a futile attempt to be helpful and not hurtful. I wish no one loved or depended on me so I could just go.
-- end TW/CN --
Sept 11: Where did all my magic & resilience go? I can't be nourished or create w/o superhuman effort. A scroll through my feed breaks me into bits.
I feel like there are blocks on every path but an increasing pressure pushing me forward against them. It seems like an endless succession of this-week-is-more-stressful-than-last, an endless series of needing to make efforts that I can't believe in. Every day that goes by with me not having a job feels like an additional punch of hopelessness and additional proof that I will never be valued by people in power enough to make even what I need to survive. I feel a need to protect myself from more punches so that I don't get too anxious/depressed to function or live, but I have no way to do so. So every day I feel more pressure to get a job immediately, which I have no real control over.
In five months of job hunting, I have applied to so many jobs, literally hundreds. I have gotten a response from no more than five. I have had one interview -- and not for one of the jobs that will actually pay a living wage, but from a cashiering job. Hopefully I will get that and it will tide me over until I can get something that will allow me to actually use my skills, live without excessive worry, and be able to help others. I suppose the good part of it is I have become much less afraid of applying in general. Constant rejection has burned out my sensitivity to it.
Most difficult is lacking something to look forward to. If there was something I could look forward to it would help, but literally every potential joy feels blocked off by one thing or another, and money is a large part of it of course. I can't imagine the future -- it is all greyed out and I feel completely helpless.
To add to this stress, my parents both just lost their jobs (though M has military retirement so they still have income) and my sibling S warned me that they are likely going to try to get me to move out of this house so they can sell it. Honestly it's not in sell-able condition so I think logically they will give up when they realize how impractical it is, but I'm not sure -- they would love to force me to come live with them instead, and that combined with the fact that M is afraid of job hunting (having never had to do it before) may mean that they are willing to take a huge loss to have money now. I live here for free because I literally have no money.
The house is in bad shape -- not rent-able or sell-able -- and if they didn't have someone here to empty the dehumidifiers regularly it would be a pile of mold. So, the only way I can see them actually selling/renting it is if they get family members to come work on it for months to repair/re-floor/paint the downstairs bathroom (which currently has no sink or tub or shower, has unfinished walls and a warped & stained linoleum floor), fix the upstairs toilet, fix the warped kitchen floor, fix the broken fridge, replace the warped front door & screen door, repair the dishwasher, probably repaint the kitchen cabinets, replace a bunch of the windows to make it less of a moisture sieve, deal with whatever creatures in the attic have chewed through the wires in my ceiling fan, and probably get two more dehumidifiers to actually fix the problem (the two I have barely can keep up with it, and before I made my dad buy them there was mold growing on every porous surface). And if they're selling it they'll probably have to fix the driveway, which currently scrapes the belly of any car that dares to drive down.
Apologies to new friends -- it's not a great time to be meeting me, but hopefully things will take a turn for the better soon.
No advice, please, but as always you are welcome to share stories from your life.