Who Needs a Therapist When (Pt. 11)

I have been meaning to make myself a coffee for about two hours now. Last time I did this it was 6 PM and before I found myself making a coffee it was obviously too late to drink. Yesterday I really intended to make lunch. I was hungry. Food needed to happen. But it was still almost 4:30 before I remembered to make lunch.

The small stack of notes, to-do lists, and half-finished projects that I carry around all day, everyday at work. Things that I should do, should finish, and need to do right now, all cluttered together because if I let any of them go, I will never remember them again.

I find myself having the conversation, "Did I tell you about _____?" "Yes, like three times," everyday because I genuinely don't remember even important conversations, and the brain tag of "tell person this" keeps prompting me long after I have told that person and more.

Yet, it isn't just forgetfulness. I'll space out while driving two or three times in a single drive. I'm still following traffic, still stopping at lights, but it is like my brain checks out for a moment. I'll come back and found I missed a turn, took the wrong turn, or nothing out of the ordinary happened—and I never know what it will be.

I have a hard time remembering words like "fork," "receipt," "causality," and "Facebook." Sometimes I will say a sentence and realize once I have said it that it was just word salad. Sometimes I stutter through a sentence, stumbling over words as my partner, coworkers, and strangers joke about Freudian slips. I got a coworker's name wrong four times the other day—and we work together on several large projects.

Sometimes, on good days, I look over something that I wrote on bad days. I'm just editing a bit so that I can finish the story, the comment, or the post. But it isn't just editing a bit. It's finding major issues, logical inconsistencies, and unfinished sentences that I clearly thought were complete. It's looking back on what I thought were at least adequate and realizing that I wasn't just not functioning on all cylinders, but that none of my cylinders were even attached.

I know it is just brain fog. That memory problems are a common side effect of depression, and that it has been both worse and better before. I know that it has as much to do with low dopamine and lack of focus as it does with lack of serotonin and the inability to think. I know that it is a normal part of severe depression and that it will ease if I can ever retrain my brain to function again.

But I'm getting really sick of feeling like an idiot.

The worst part is that nothing really helps. Antidepressants often make it worse, weed certainly doesn't help, and the sleep deprivation that comes from ignoring my sleep issues also makes it worse. Any time I treat some other symptom, this one raises its head, reminding me just how many limitations I have. Just how far I am from being able to live even the normal life I once had. It is there to remind me that for all that people talk about the "clarity" of depression, that clarity is only relative compared to the fog that surrounds everything else.

So, I guess the point is, this sucks. At least most of my friends are nice enough to be patient and wait through the long pauses, frequent miscommunication, and fuzzy ideas. But if I could fix any one thing about depression, it wouldn't be the lack of drive or the anhedonia. It would be the sleeping problems and the stupid stupid brain fog.

I'd like to go back to living one of these days. If my stupid brain would just cooperate.

Last Week's (Pt. 10)

Part 1