I feel like everything is closing in

I don’t really know what to say. Sigh. My head is all over the place so I apologise if my thoughts are unorganised or incoherent. Nothing really feels real to me anymore. I know I have dissociation issues, but it’s different this time. It’s as if the behind the scene glimpse I normally get when I de-realise is now permanent. It feels as if I’m just floating through this world which is devoid of all meaning and purpose. I know I should be happy, I feel guilty that I’m depressed. I feel as if I were born into a great situation; upper-middle class family, good school, all of my basic needs met. I have everything that I could possibly need and more. Starving people would love my life, people with terminal illnesses would gladly swap with me, people who have nothing would sell their soul to be in my shoes. I feel like I’m just an unappreciative spoiled brat. I told my therapist, “Emotions are a first-world luxury, people around the world don’t have the time to worry about how pointless life is because they’re looking for their next meal. I feel horrible because I have what they would die for and I’m just moping about because existence serves no purpose and that there is, in fact, no greater purpose to anything.”

If someone were to ask me, “If you could get rid of your depression, would you”, I’d be expected to immediately say yes, but I’m not sure that I would. I feel as if my depression is a part of who I am, and that without my hyper sense of reality I’d just be another happy little ignorant teenage girl. I don’t want that. More than anything I don’t want that. To me it seems that when I’m depressed, (aka most of my waking hours), I’m seeing the world for what it truly is. It’s like a stripped down view of how pointless reality is, kind of like seeing a celebrity without makeup. You realise how ordinary and ugly life really is. We as humans tend to place such intrinsic value on the most trivial things. Sometimes I feel that the apathy that tends to come pre-breakdown episodes is just a lack of arbitrary emotions that other ignorant individuals were blessed with. Ignorance is bliss is what everyone says. And I’m saddened to admit that this is true. Who knew that being intelligent could be such a curse, for no matter how hard I try I cannot ignore the blatant fact that all is pointless and without meaning. My logical mind has accepted this, yet some part of me still wants to cling to the idea that all life has meaning, and that makes me sad. I don’t want to be happy because I have somehow managed to equate happiness to ignorance, and ignorance to stupidity. So in my mind, if I were to ‘beat’ depression I’d become stupid, senseless, and I’d lose a revered part of who I am, (I greatly value my innate ability to reason). Sometimes I wake up in the morning and realise that I’m living and that life is mundane, that all of my favourite books and movies lied to me as a young child, telling me that one day I’ll stumble upon some great adventure and I’ll save the world. This is what I firmly believed as a child, and now that I realise I’ll never achieve this, it seems that all my life will ever be is a disappointment. The truth is that I just want to curl up in a ball and bawl my heart out. I hate that I still try to find a sense of meaning, I hate it that I want to feel, I hate the idea of being happy, I hate that because I’m on medication it feels like I’m lying to myself. No, I don’t currently want to be rid of this life; I feel like I owe it to people to live.