TRIGGER WARNINGS: TOPICS OF DEPRESSION, DEATH, SADNESS, AND LOSS. Please do not read this article if any of the mentioned themes may be triggering to you. Please know that you are not alone, and that you matter. You are special beyond words and stronger than your mind allows you to believe. If you are feeling sad, isolated, or in danger from your thoughts, please reach out to someone.
Falling into depression is like a certain death. A peculiar one, similar to the one where you outgrow an older version of yourself, move cities, or fall in love. It’s this weird phenomenon of separating yourself from everything you’ve ever known yourself to be, and feeling yourself ooze into things beyond the encasings of your body and mind. You begin to seem trapped in this space of “in between” where you’re not wholly awake, nor are you asleep; you’re completely unaware of what’s going on. Depression causes life to turn into a sort of in limbo, where reality seems blurry and ironic, and every passing day seems more meaningless than the last–something I’ve recently had to deal with.
For the past two years, that state has been my reality. I’ve spent life isolated in my home, doomed to repeat the exact same day over and over again. I’ve woken up to go over the same routine time and time again, telling myself that the next day would be the one when I’d feel better, when things would finally change–but nothing would.
Most days I found myself living in a pure state of filth. I would wake up to my room covered in clothes, having slept in the same sweats I’d been in for days, my face covered by a translucent sludge of oil that I couldn’t have been bothered to clean off. I often couldn’t remember the last time I had showered, or even had the energy to do so. I felt disgusting, like my body and mind were betraying me, causing even the simplest acts of self care and hygiene I used to love to seem impossible.
I felt utterly hopeless. At the beginning of my depression and the beginning of the pandemic, things felt okay. Yeah, I was feeling sad and isolated, but I believed that these feelings would once again turn into unfamiliar emotions; ones that that I had once felt, that I once knew. But over time, they began to settle deep within me, making their presence in my mind and body known. I was slowly, but surely, losing myself.
To escape these uncomfortable feelings within me, I formed a crippling addiction to my phone. I spent about 80% of my time on my phone from the second I woke up to the second I went to sleep; I couldn’t be alone with my thoughts for one second and needed constant stimulation. I began consuming mass amounts of spiritual, wellness, and “glow up” content. I thought, “hey, maybe seeing other people get their lives together will help me feel inspired to take a little bit of action in mine,” but the effect was exactly the opposite. The content made me feel worse about my state because what I was seeing was a constant reminder of what I was not, and just contributed to creating deeper insecurities within me. I began forming insecurities I wasn’t even aware could exist; I became afraid that I wasn’t leading the lifestyle of “that girl,” the internet “girlboss” archetype that has her whole life together; I became overly aware of wether I was thinking “low vibrational” thoughts, or wether I was manifesting my own doom. My social media addiction was rendering life impossible.
After a breakdown one night, I was confronted with the harsh reality that if I go on like this, I won’t be able to go on living my life. I had to make a choice between choosing to be my own self, or obsessing over the idea of who I “could be” for the rest of my life. I decided to go with the first option, and to once and for all stop obsessing over how appearances and lifestyles are portrayed on the internet. While this transition to caring for myself and loving myself didn’t happen overnight, I did see some pretty big changes. All of a sudden the attention that would have otherwise been devoted to obsessing over my physical appearance and curating my life to perfection shifted to the smaller things in life. It was as if everything that I felt social media made me care about just didn’t matter anymore, but in the most refreshing, positive way possible. Every fear I had had in the past over “letting myself go,” not exercising, not being my “best self” had been realized as I wasn’t giving my appearance an obsessive amount of attention. I reframed working out in my mind to an activity done to gain strength, and saw food as fuel rather than something to perfect. To my surprise, the change was pretty nice. It was freeing to just see myself as the exact opposite of what I felt I “should be,” and see that this was okay.
I even realized it was okay to feel down, to be sad, and to not feel 100%. I realized I didn’t have to chant “daily affirmations,” or manifest obsessively in a journal when things got bad, and that I could be okay just going through the motions. Just simply acknowledging the existence of those emotions instead of trying to run away from them and repress them through vigorous self care routines that the internet told me I should do allowed me to tap into the real world around me. I began spending more time with my family, trying to cook and eat more, and going on walks more often. I realized how beautiful and precious the world actually was, and how utterly unreal the world online is.
Growing up in the digital age, and especially being a young woman at this time, can become exhausting due to how much pressure there is put on you to be “perfect.” Because of aesthetic videos on TikTok and circulating trends like the “that girl” trend, we can often fall into the pressures of feeling like we need to display ourselves as perfectly as possible, abandoning who we are for who we feel like we should be. Taking time away from the digital world can really help us reconnect with ourselves and reframe our own values for ourselves, and can only benefit us. As cliche as it is, the best version you can be is the version that you truly want to be; the version you truly are. Regardless of how uncomfortable finding that version of you is or how long it can take, self kindness and compassion will allow for more growth and self love than perfection could ever promise.