Arthur Fleck was wrong. The worst thing about having a mental illness isn't that people expect you to behave as if you don't. It's that you behave as if you don't without realizing it, because you don't realize that your mind is fucking crumbling away.
That's how it is with depression, anyway. You don't notice the onset. Your pastimes don't please you as much as they once did, so you spend more time on them attempting to wring out the satisfaction you once earned. Your job feels more difficult and less engaging than it used to be, so you try various shit to make you focus on it again, and it doesn't work and you start to feel stress as your productivity wanes. People you talk to via phone and texts and shit don't seem to care anymore, or at least it seems that way to you, and you grow paranoid and untrusting of them. You don't become aware that something's sucking the life out of you; you just try to treat the symptoms as they come and keep on living as you had before. The further your shit falls apart, the more desperately you try to shore up what remains.
As you grow ever more and more miserable, you become frantic. You flail in every direction, like you're drowning in a pitch-black ocean; you can't even figure out which direction you should swim in to get a breath of fresh air. And holding in the air you still have, trying to stay alive at all, feels ever more difficult.
The most important thing, when that happens, is to know whom you can reach out to for help. If shit like a COVID lockdown hasn't chased you into the shadows and isolated you from the world, maybe people have already noticed and are already intervening. Either way, though, you have to realize that shit's fucked and you have to be ready to make changes. And it will feel hard to make changes. One of the worst things about depression is that every single thing you could try to do to better your situation feels insurmountably difficult. It's not, but it can take a push, or even a sharp prod, to get you to start fucking doing it.
Doing better, though. Hopefully will continue to get better. Lockdowns fuck you up a lot if you live alone and every avenue that you'd normally take to go out and meet people has been closed. They fuck you up even more if your surroundings have turned actively hostile, such as if the local parks have fucking tent cities full of stolen property in them because local law enforcement stopped giving a shit in the wake of the riots. I had to basically force myself to start seeking out local organizations that were based enough to flip the bird at anyone telling them they couldn't do in-person events. We'll see how that progresses in the coming weeks.
at least i didn't lose my anal virginity in the midst of my desperate flailing
