I’m just going back through all my old posts on the old blog as I work to transfer them to this new domain (iaindstewart.net), and I can finally see why I was depressed all those years ago. It’s as clear as day now I have some insight into what depression is and how it affects you. I was essentially staying up late playing videogames, eating junk and drinking too much Diet Coke and coffee and smoking loads of cigarettes, all the while hiding in the virtual world. I was immersing myself in the fantasy world of the internet where I was “popular”, an internet moderator and a videogame overlord as opposed to the real world where I felt like an absolute failure and unable to move on from my past. It’s a sequence of events I would go on to repeat several times over my life, until I realised I was doing it, at which point I took ownership of it, realised that my past is not going to change but that it does not define me and who I am today, and no-one is going to hand me the life I want on a platter, I have to work for it. No-one is going to insert the knowledge I want into my brain, I have to learn it myself.
Some salient posts that stick out to me:
Maybe I should see a psychiatrist
Not enough and too much
GCSE results
Ultrasound results
I could see I was a mess, but I couldn’t see a way out. As soon as the course was cancelled, that was it, dream over, and I just went back to how I was before. I felt I needed someone’s permission to live my life the way I wanted to, not my own permission, but someone external to me.
This one is a kicker. “Pretty soon I’m just gonna just throw in the towel in pretty much every aspect of my life and just resign myself to working on a till in Sainsbury’s for the rest of my life”. I was waiting for someone to swoop in and save me. I was waiting for someone to drop in and say “Hey, you, don’t be sad, you are awesome, and you can come and work for me doing stuff you wanna do and I’ll train you and it’ll be great!”
Suffice to say, that never happened.
