Working Through The Bad Days
Every single person dealing with depression has good and bad days. For me those bad days seem to seep into good days within seconds. I can wake up feeling good and ready for the day, but it’s as if almost a switch goes off in my brain and suddenly I can’t do anything. I feel stuck. As much as I try to pull myself up and to do something, it feels like I’m weighed down. Days like these didn’t used to be so common to me, I think it became a much bigger issue during COVID. Being inside practically 24/7 affected me mentally. During COVID, I was in my Senior year in high school, and at the beginning of the year classes were online. It was monotonous. It would be the same cycle every single day. Wake up, turn on the computer, go through the google meets, and go back to bed. Every single day. I began to lose sense of the days. After a while I just didn’t feel like doing it anymore, I began to slack on classes and I wouldn’t even show up to the google meets. I felt completely hopeless. Around the middle of the school year they announced that classes would resume in a hybrid format and students would be allowed to return to school, if they wished. I decided I would go back and hopefully it would help me to be a little more productive and motivated. But it was completely different to what it used to be before. No one would talk to each other, we were all so used to the screens and being behind a camera that you could turn off that we forgot how to interact with each other face to face. I only went to classes in person for about a week before I realized that I’d rather just stay home and deal with my depression there. To me it wasn’t worth going back because it was basically the same, and I still felt the same. So now I’ve been out of school for almost 3 years, and to this day I still struggle with these same feelings. Being stuck and not being able to pull myself out. Getting those days where you can’t do anything. It’s almost as if you are stuck inside your own body trying to scream, but no one is listening. During these days I wish I could just turn it off, I could just fight through it, but nothing ever works. I am still trying to work on pushing through, but I’ve realized now that for me at least, some of those days you can’t do anything. As much as you hope and fight to do something, it won’t work. Sometimes you just need days where you don’t do anything, and then you move on and keep living your life. On those bad days you can only do so much for yourself, even getting up is a struggle, but making goals for those days can help ease it a little. Telling yourself I’m going to get up for 5 minutes, I’m going to brush my teeth, I’m going to change my clothes. Those little goals, although they feel impossible while you’re in a rut, can make a whole world of difference. But it’s okay to not be able to do anything, sometimes you can’t do anything, but at least you have enough energy to wake up. All you need to do in these moments is to push through and keep going, even if you don’t want to or feel as if you can’t.