I Don't Care (Enough)

I'm back in therapy after a long time of not being in therapy. It's kinda refreshing, too, because my new therapist actually has a PhD as opposed to all the counselors that I had been seeing before whose job it was to sit and listen to me complain rather than actually determining that I had deeper problems than that and trying to find a way to fix them.

So according to my therapist, it's "quite obvious that [I'm] severely depressed, and have been for a long time." At first, I was kinda like, "No. You're kidding," but then I was relieved that somebody actually acknowledged it instead of telling me that I was just some kid who had gone through some tough shit in her life. That was a hell of a lot more obvious than the fact that I was (am) depressed.

What I particularly wanted to talk about was the primary factor of my depression, which is the fact that I just don't care at all about anything. This can be a good thing because I don't care about what people think of me, but that kinda leads into not caring about what I think of myself or of other things, and that leads to poor hygiene and laziness, which leads to bad grades and that, eventually, will completely dash all my hopes of getting into a good university, but because of all this, I won't care that I didn't get in, because who needs school anyway?

This may come as a surprise to you, but I am an introvert; I gain energy from being alone with my thoughts. My depression and not caring makes me psychologically drained all the time, which makes a couple things happen. First of all, I crave and eat a lot of carbs because carbs are energy and so my body feels like it needs a lot of them to gain the energy that I'm somehow not getting. Second, I'm by myself all the time because my brain has a different method of gaining energy, which is by making me stay in bed all day and stuff my face with grain and dairy products. This turns into a vicious circle of feeling bad about myself because I eat too much and never move or talk to people which makes me want to eat a lot and never move or talk to people. I live a very unhealthy lifestyle of internet - food - internet - sleep which is a bad habit that doesn't include three regular meals or social interaction by means of anything other than on a computer screen.

Some days, however, my not-caring takes over so much that I reason with myself that there's no point in eating, so I don't. I might eat a couple of crackers or a banana for breakfast, but then I usually just won't eat until about 8 pm. The way I see it, there are two kinds of sadness: binge-eating sadness and starve-yourself sadness. I take part in both, irregularly, which has all kinds of problems attached to it, medically and psychologically.

Not caring about anything has made me almost feel good about myself, mostly because my internal reasoning is pretty much made up of, "yeah, you're ugly, but who cares? There's someone for everyone, even if that everyone happens to be a crazy, unfit bitch like you," which would make me sad if I cared about anything. Which I don't. It's a kind of self abuse that would make me really, really anxious and self-conscious if my depression wasn't so bad that I just didn't care.

I think the not-caring stemmed from my previous anxiety in a way. After I couldn't get into Sealth, I just decided that I didn't care anymore, which made me feel instinctively good, because in reality it all was just a dumb little thing that was making me worry too much for no real reason. Letting go of it felt good, so it became my coping mechanism. If something bad happened, I would just think to myself, "is this really so important that it's worth your time caring about it?" and my response would always be "no", just to feel that tiny, insignificant burden lifted which my brain told me was happiness. So it turned into the emotional equivalent of a drug, my brain using it whenever it felt like it needed to just to feel the high of not being anxious anymore, and it turned into an addiction. I would think to myself that I needed to eat breakfast, and it would say back to me, "are you really hungry enough to eat something today? Why should you care about it? You'll be fine," and I wouldn't eat breakfast. Then it would be things like, "I really should do my homework; I'm failing this class" and it would reply, "but it's sooooo booorrring. Play SWTOR instead! You need to level up your Sith Warrior!" which spiraled into things like "I should try getting dressed today..." and my brain replying, "but sweatshirts and yoga pants are so much more comfortable. Why should you care about how you look anyway?"

Not caring is also like a drug in the sense that I built up an immunity to it as it started to run my life. Not caring didn't make me happy anymore, it just made me lazy. There was this heavy feeling of negative apathy that was always around me and the carelessness started getting abusive, but it would counteract itself by not caring that it was abusing itself. It was a downward spiral. I had a serious lack of social interaction, which is self-explanatory, and I also had a poor diet because I didn't even care enough to boil a pot of pasta, which is about the simplest thing you can cook. The saddest part about all of this is the fact that it's still happening, and I only used past-tenses because it sounds cooler.

That's pretty much it for today. Sorry about the abruptness. I didn't care enough to write out an ending.