i am not my depression
Recently, I've been trying to locate my "writer voice," and what I find amusing, almost comical is how violently I tend to oscillate between Live your life! Start now! Pursue your goals! and, a few blogposts later, I am still depressed.
On Bear, these contradictions sit side by side, and in them I've recognized a fragile line: the difference between something you're experiencing and something you are. I find depression erodes that boundary. It blurs experience into identity, perpetuating a narrative of your life that feels totalizing but not necessarily true.
When I was struggling, I assumed it must've been because I was cynical, ungrateful, fundamentally flawed. My utter disengagement for living became evidence of a personal failure, an innate disposition rather than a passing state. We were fused together, depression and me. Where did it end, and where did I start?
I find it oddly consoling in the way my blog reads like a tug-of-war between motivational exigency and despair. These contradictions are not incoherence but proof of life. Proof that I exist apart from what I once collapsed into for years, what made me desperately ask myself: What is making me feel so different from everyone else?
The fact I can write, stubbornly, about goals, productivity, and forward motion at all is evidence (to myself) that a part of me hasn't yet surrendered. Depression is something I live with, but it's not my identity. My writing stands a quiet testimony to a person existing alongside an illness, resisting absorption and refusing erasure.