met my doctor/counselor yesterday…I have been suffering with prolonged depression and grief…well more than a decade. My counselor acknowledged life has been very severe on me. Repeated losses, failures, shame which has left me scarred and scared making me severely anxious. It may often appear, for a man who is 56, that my angst and lament, vulnerability and anxiety are more of a mis-besotted teen, very juvenile. Maybe that’s my senility. I have prolonged depressive disorder… My doc feels there was perhaps a melancholic disposition inherent in me even earlier as a kid…continuous setbacks, personal & professional has permanently impaired me…😢 the worse is my loneliness…no one sees my grief and the abjectness of my condition…dismissing it, ridiculing it, comparing and invalidating it…This becomes more humiliating. For now there’s one friend who supports & understands…doesn’t judge me…stays with me when possible… hears me out… rest are all very instrumentally helpful at best if not totally indifferent. With no spouse, kids or siblings, my isolation is total. My career too was continuously bewitched that further debilitated my esteem and dignity. Repeated setbacks aggravated my despair and i just had to give up work too. People familiar with my history which I have shared many times over the years here may also be tired reading all over again. Yet I hope few will still remain empathetic and reach out.

Many feel that because I look for meaning in everything I do, I have ended up so. Few look for meaning - work, family and even socialisation is all out there and people carry it out their roles as a machine meant to carry out its functions. This may look very existential reasoning but existentialism I imagine is not something that emerges in such mundanity and routines but through deep thoughts. However to transcend mind and meanings in certain agency and subjectivity is beyond an ordinary me. Guess most today are socialised into indifference by default. Being and remaining an automaton serves the larger system too which thrives in its meaninglessness and folks are primed to merely play out their roles.

Friends who still may care are perhaps helpless…but to me their helplessness appears like indifference and cold diffidence. My doc recognises how i still do my best to keep myself functional…but just not enough to keep myself sane for long…medicines help but they can only go so far . Some worthies aver that the only control I have is in my ability to respond to crisis…not the repeated and crushing episodes, failures, loss 😞. That life is not fair is so brutally exemplified in my life story. The misery, the damnation, the horror of loss, grief and loneliness. This strangely I feel I cannot get over and it’s not even meant to be gotten over. A life of despair, melancholia, grief is a permanent part of me but which in many ways also helps me to understand the world, existence differently and expose many of the shibboleths that people carry both aware and unaware. Yet the extreme sense of failure overwhelms and death as relieving from misery is a possibility that reigns my mind always. 😞🙏🏽 #Grief #melancholia #prolongedepressive #Anxiety #Loneliness #acuteisolation #Depression #Shame #failure #SuicidalThoughts