In yesterday’s post, I started listing how I knew that I was depressed. I also mentioned two incidents with my father that underlined how much disdain he had for women, but I did not actually talk about the second incident.
Backstory: We are Asian. This means that we played ping-pong. It’s the law that we had a ping-pong table in the basement and played quite frequently. My father was the best, then my mother, then me, then my brother. We played singles and doubles, depending on how we felt. My father and I were very competitive (not necessarily with each other, but in general), whereas my brother and my mother were more chill.
You know that thing where you let your kids beat you in something so that they feel good about themselves? Yeah, my parents did not adhere to that theory. At all. My mother didn’t try to beat us kids; she just played her best. Which meant she could beat us, of course, but her goal wasn’t to humiliate us. She was just playing because she loved playing.
My father, on the other hand, had every intention of showing that he was so much better than his two kids. He didn’t just play. He didn’t even just play to win. He made sure to be as sneaky as possible so he could make us look foolish in the process. So, dropping serves just over the net, spinning the ball away from the person, and slamming the ball as hard as possible when he was set up for it. All of these are legal in the game, by the way. And perfectly fine to do in a game. However, did a forty-year-old man really need to show up his kids in that fashion? I would posit that no, he did not. My father did because that was his nature, but a normal man with a modicum of empathy would not have felt the need to rub our faces in it.
I can still remember the smile/sneer on his face as he did this, clearly taking delight in making his kids look foolish. It did not feel good, I’ll tell you that for free.
We kept playing as my brother and I grew up. Of course, I got better with time. My father did not because he was already at the top of his game, and it wasn’t as if he was practicing to be competitive.
Anyway, when I was in my early twenties, I finally beat him. And then he never played against me again. Beceause that was the kind of man he was, and that showed his thinking when it came to men and women.
Back to depression and how I can tell when I’m sinking into it.
3. I waste time doing anything but what I should be doing.
I work best when I have a schedule to follow. I know I’m depressed when I start neglecting my routine. I can get my Taiji/Bagua done, but it takes longer because I am reading too much on my phone while doing it.
This is the porblem. I browse the internet for hours and play too many video games when I’m depressed. I do both of these things, regardless, but in moderate proportions when I’m not depressed.
My brain: Minna, get to work.
My hands: *Clicks on game I’m currently playing and ignores brain.*
It’s so frustating because a small part of the same brain urges me to do my work as I”m playing the game, but I ignore it. It doesn’t help that sometimes it’s hard for me to make myself do a chore at all. I was joking with a friend that I wasted so much time avoiding a chore that would take so little time in comparison if I actually just did it.
This is one of the things that made me more depressed when I was in therapy–I knew what was wrong with me. I even knew what I needed to do, but I just could not make myself do it. Then, I felt bad because I couldn’t make myself do the thing I needed to do.
This actually
4. I’m more acerbic (in my head).
I’m a sharp person even in th best of times, but I can keep it on this side of good-natured more often than not. When there starts to be an edge to everything I say or think, then I know I’m getting depressed.
I do look at the negatives more often than not, but I can usually find a silver lining. When everything becomes negative, then I know that I’m dragging. It’s similar to when I start feeling that nobody loves me and I would be better off dead. That’s my broken brain talking, and I know that it’s not true.
Here’s the insidious thing. It creeps up on me so slowly, I don’t realize it until it’s past the point of obvious. Like, when I can’t make a oke out of anything, that’s past the point of no return.
5. I feel numb.
This is related to the last point. When I’m depressed, all my feelings are pressed down into the corner of my heart. Or soul. Or wherever I store my emotions. maybe my big toe. Hey! That was a joke, so I am not completely depressed.
I was not allowed to feel negative emotions when I was a kid, so my way of dealing with them was to stuff them down and suppress them as best as I could. I was able to do that most of the times, which probably didn’t help with the depression. That’s something interesting to think about later on–which came first: the depression or the repression. I can remember being deeply depressed as early as seven, but I can also remember being chastised for showing emotions at that age as well.
Either way, it was a loop of hell. One would lead to the other and back again, making an oroboros of negativity. Also, it’s a quarter after four in the morning, whereas the last time I looked at the clock, it was roughly two. Yes, I was playing a casual game, which means that I let time slip away from me again.
I am going to bed now. I will write more later.