When they say depression is paralyzing, they mean in every possible aspect of your life. Friends, careers, family, music, art, the books you read (when you even have the energy to pick one up); your smile, the way you eat (IF you eat), touch, smell, taste; just everything. Even typing this now is painful. But I think the most painful loss of depression is definitely the potential that you used to see in yourself.

I always say to myself that “I never grew past the age of 14” because it’s true. Mentally, emotionally, my depression stumped all of this from developing when it started taking over my entire being in the sixth grade. Now 24, I am still that same confused, angry, and miserable kid, only now I have all the useless self help knowledge and distain from my family. But I don’t really mean that, the lat bit anyway. My family loves me, at least I think (hope?) that they do, but I wouldn’t love me. I don’t actually, that’s part of the problem actually. But getting back to my point, I believe my family is fed up with me because the only solutions they offer are a quick comment about my hormones acting up or a scathing remark about how immature I am. As you can see, depression isn’t just dreary and unfeeling; sometimes it’s feeling so much, too much, at once (anger, frustration, self loathing, fear, cynicism, etc.) that your body just shuts down and your brain snatches a one way ticket to Negative Thinking Hell. And that’s where I’m at, gents! I just keep spiraling in every direction but the one I want to go in.

I suppose I should stop my rambling to tell you why I started writing all this. Well, mostly it IS a ramble, just to get my thoughts out faster than using paper and pencil, but also, as the title goes, I really need some help.

You see, long story short, my sister brought home COVID into our home and my whole family is infected. I HATED her for the first few day. Still feel a bit of a grudge right now, but I’ll get to that in a second. You see to 1) A HUGE germafobe (I think that’s how it’s spelled) and 2) Someone who has been adamantly telling their non-mask wearing, party-going sister to stay home and protect the family, I feel like I failed. I did fail. I failed to protect my family because they wouldn’t listen to me. Now, some would argue that this isn’t my fault (I’ve had a therapist and the suicide text help person say that this was so) but, as you can guess for someone like me, it just another thing to add to that list called “Why I Hate Myself”.

So, here we all are, a few days in, all quarantined together in our home, in separate rooms (because some of us have a different strain than others) and it is indescribable the reeling that I have been experiencing. I feel so alone, there is nothing that can make me see the light, because to me, there isn’t one. I’ve tried to kill myself everyday since, holding sleeping pills in my hand until hours pass and I lose the nerve over and over again, just ending up putting them back in the bottle feeling like a coward.

And then, the icing on the cake.

As I’ve said before, things between my sister and I are nonexistent. I haven’t spoken to her in 6 days(my mother has been trying to get us to communicate through emotional manipulation saying things along the lines of “ok you can take your time to sort things out, but it breaks my heart when I can’t hear your laughter in the house” or “your sister is your best and only friend you know; remember how much she loved you on Christmas?” but I digress) However, around the half way point, I did try to explain to her how I was feeling and why it was so hard to talk to her. So I explained in a much calmer way than I really wanted to about how traumatizing this is for me and how I just needed some time to process things and since she was the source of it, that yes, I was angry with her and needed time from her as well in order to cultivated eventual forgiveness and move on from there.

You wanna know what she said?

“Oh cool. Ignore me, that’s fine.”

Wow. Ok. At first, I didn’t know what to do with that because…what???? Then I wasn’t surprised because she’s never taken accountability for anything, especially if she’s hurt me. It’s usually customary in this family to sweep everything under the rug, smile behind angry eyes and pretend nothing is wrong, but then bring up past mistakes as gossip and blackmail at a later date. So, at a second glance, realizing this, I still tried to give her the chance to see how I was feeling. Do you think she apologized and said, “I see the light!” and offered to help me through this in any way she could, or provide comfort?

Nope.

She said, in a very passive-aggressive tone, “I’ve already apologized, but if ignoring me helps you, then go ahead.”

So here we are, 6 days later, New Year’s Eve, with me feeling lonely and guilty for reasons I don’t understand and I honestly don’y know how to move past this. There are so many thoughts in my head: (get productive, start looking for a job for next year, try to move to Canada, lay down and go to sleep until tomorrow, watch Dead Poets Society, send a message saying you’re sorry to your sister, tell her your sorry in person, never speak to her again, never speak to ANYONE again, spit profanities and all the anger I feel if someone says “it’s your hormones” one more time, cry,  take those sleeping pills at midnight, take them now, continue existing in this no-man’s land of despair by putting on fake smiles and act like everything is ok (a.k.a the old family fall back))

I know that I sound insane, and frankly I’ve lost it a long time ago, but I don’t want to be like this. I’ve tried EVERYTHING to help myself and I failed. So please if you read this, please help me. Please give me something to live for and a reason to keep trying because I’ve searched every corner of the internet, every corner of my brain, every corner of every bookstore, to find a way out of this and I can’t look anymore.