tom's blobs

My little lethargy

IMPORTANT: What follows is a description of what goes on in a certain kind of depression. It doesn’t try to be hopeful or encouraging. Please be aware of this and take care when You continue.

I’m sharing this one because I have a hunch that my experience is not unique. Maybe a stranger will recognize a part of themselves in these words and feel alleviated, knowing that they aren’t so strange.

Musical suggestion: Tangerine Dream — Nebulous Dawn

Sitting down to work at 13:30 — a success after two days of utter avoidance, reliving the deepest phase of my depression. I’ve spent a good portion of my twenties like this: nervously napping at my desk the whole day, youtube in the background, reduced to an uncomfortable heap of flesh by some kind of panicked physiological override.

The behavioral pattern goes something like this:

The “empty” hours of lethargy feel pretty intense, funny enough. My body fills with dread and anxiety, my chest tightens, knots form in my gut — that sort of thing. The resulting state does not lend itself to verbal analysis. Over the years, I’ve tried to decipher the feelings with mixed success. It’s hard to do subtle introspection while my adrenaline gland is screaming at me.

Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together. The vibe of the pattern goes something like: I am clearly tired, but I can’t allow myself to embrace that. I shouldn’t be tired, I should be “working”. But since I can’t work, I will at least punish myself by never truly resting. My body doesn’t deserve a position to comfortably relax — it should be contorted at all times. I won’t stretch out in bed, I will bunch up in my office chair and my head will be dangling the whole time. I certainly won’t accept I’m exhausted and admit that I might need a day off (or a week, or a month; or some help).

Instead, there’s a sense of shame — a vague but cutting feeling of failure for not doing anything “productive”, not “getting ahead”, not looking for a job, not adding to my pension fund, not following an ambition, not honoring a talent…

It seems like I have it pinned down when I write it out like this, but the issue still feels fuzzy and obscure — some part of it always hidden, unreachable. I never got a narrative that would feel like a satisfying explanation, just one motif: I am wasting time. And this is bad

(Here, I see a fork in the road: we could detour through Heidegger’s concept of anxiety, or take a roundabout back to my parents and their devaluation of any activity outside of capitalistic work. I’ll just keep plowing ahead for now.)

This is already analysis and post-facto introspection — it’s not something I consciously perceive when I’m sitting in my chair and trying to lean my head against the edge in the least painful way. No inner demon is berating me and telling me to get up and work, at least not in fully formed human language. I just feel my heart pounding ever faster.

The feeling worsens as the day progresses: the anxiety accumulates by the minute, clogging up my chest; the knots in my guts multiply; my voice disappears. There are moments of feeling truly vile, hollow, utterly broken, mad with stress, alone in unspeakable shame. Strange fantasies bubble up — visions of bursting into tears. But I’m too paralyzed to actually cry. (Writing this piece has felt cathartic more than once.)

This can go on. Sometimes, after hours in stasis, I stir, fueled by a sort of frustration. I jerk myself free. The mood is frantic. It feels like I’m whipping myself into counter-action. I just wanna do something. I might tidy up, make something to eat, take a bike ride, exercize, work on a project. A walk to the supermarket could be my chance at redemption — “at least I got this little thing done today”. After being repressed, a creative energy can also burst out in excess: I stay up late and give tomorrow’s vicious circle a jump start by waking up extra tired. There’s a haphazard yearning to make up for lost time in all these actions.

Rising up from inaction doesn’t feel like a success. The lost time remains with too much ghastly obviousness. The wasted hours have seeped through and accrued into a source of perpetual regret. Something in me lives just to remind me that the failure is irrevocable.

This cycle of lethargy is hard to talk about, even to close people. It warps with shame and inflates, overshadowing the rest of life. All expression is stifled. There is something wrong with me and I have to hide it at all costs. Human interaction can feel like a series of careful maneuvers: do some small talk, act cheery, say nothing, don’t go into details. Anything to avoid sight of this ugly thing and my desperation.

I’ve spent years suffocating in this state. (I’ve opened up about it since.) Life became barren. Every other capacity all seemed utterly eradicated — my hope, my humor, my pleasures, my grit… This abject anxiety is what I am now. There’s just enough left of me to be stuck here in muffled suffering. All love went cold, the myriad possibilities of a human being converged to zero, and any memory of ever having thought or felt differently vanished.

In the long twilight of Germany’s winter, a confluence of factors creates an extra peculiar state of disassociation. In these times I feel closer to death than to anything else, and I don’t mean suicidal ideation. The sky turns cloudy. The hostile cold confines my movement. The walls of my room grow stale. Sometimes a week passes without seeing the sun. As the eyes relax in the darker surroundings, I notice the city’s electric glow — the uncountable shiny screens, sickly street lamps and supermarket neons mushroom into the foreground, dousing a world of concrete in their humming haze. Something in me gives and the fine chords keeping a sense of coherence slacken, just a bit.

The system reacts. Some kind of psychological boundary turns a little more porous. Outer experience becomes, how to say, a little less solid. Things become a little surreal, especially in the habitual absence of human contact. Perception scatters. I am not quite dreaming, but not fully awake.

Old memories hover behind my eyelids. The past draws closer, fills the canvas. Passing through this narcoleptic twilight is a physical feeling, like moving through another, denser medium. But you don’t go anywhere, you’re buoyed up, suspended in a strange space, hearing the locals rouse in their nests. Nothing left to do but hope for the sunlight to stream in through a crack somewhere, once again.