i just started medication for low thyroid. hypothyroidism is something i know can cause depression. but i've been depressed for way longer than my thyroid decided to crap out on me. i don't think the medication will really help too much, maybe just a bit, but i have a lot of baggage to unpack. i have a referral for therapy, and i should take the doctor up on it and go when i have time after the new year. but i find myself not entirely wanting to. it'd be nice to feel better. but i've literally been depressed for as long as i can remember. i remember being unhappy and occasionally suicidal as young as 7 or 8 years old. i have no recollection of not being depressed and anxious. i don't know if i really ever was care free even before the times that i can remember, considering the abusive and traumatizing environment i lived in. now as an adult i'm away from that mostly. i moved away from home and the environment i am in now is much better. my partner is very supportive and very caring. she has said to me multiple times that she is here for me, but she's not a therapist and that that is what i really need to actually get better. this would be a good time to get my shit somewhat in order. but i have no clue who i am as a person really. the biggest part of my identity to myself is somebody who feels like shit all the time, and somebody who is just shit at their core. i don't know who i'd be if i suddenly didn't feel depressed. i feel scared to think of it. because it feels like if suddenly that cloud was gone, i'd just be left with who i really am, which is a shitty person, that i'll be forced to deal with. and i'd rather just kill myself than be a bad person.
Witnessed. As someone who got worse and then got better, I feel that you should not be afraid. I had the same feelings-- would I be the same person after I got help? Would I be stupider, less contemplative, meaner once I stopped triple guessing all my thoughts and actions and hating myself? The bottom line is, well, I didn't stop hating myself. I got less depressed slowly. The changes, brought on by slow-acting medication and years of turning my thought processes around, were so gradual that they were just like normal growing and changing. they happened over a long period of time, and I liked all of them. Being less of an insomniac made me more productive, more active, and more capable of helping others during the day. Being able to shut off self-hatred, on good days, led to my good days lasting longer and only cut out thoughts that were repetitive and didn't provide me anything anyway. But I didn't change fast. I still have anxiety, it's just lost some of its hold on me; it just yanks my time and energy away from me less often. I'm still contemplative and I still consider my actions carefully, hell, I do it better now that self-hatred and the conviction that my feelings don't matter is less overwhelmingly what I consider. What I didn't realize until after my treatment started is that the things I was worried about missing-- suicidal periods, long hours of insomnia, extreme anxiety and all it did for me-- were largely repetitive and didn't contribute to me much as a person. 'You should die because you're bad and you don't work and you don't help people.' Very slight variations of this, for weeks. Without that, I keep thinking about and doing and achieving different things instead of sitting in a loop. And, again, I still sit in a loop sometimes. If you're worried about changing too fast, don't worry. Healing happens very slowly, and you won't exactly be overwhelmed with it. I don't hear that anyone has suddenly become a new person because of medication, they just usually become a person with less energy and time devoted to being ill sapped away from them, and less sludge to work through if they want to do something or think of something in a new way. The danger is that, probably without realizing it, you've depended on a very specific worldview in order to be depressed, a self-hating one that depends on your belief in kind of nonsensical things to work. You're an inherently bad person, somehow; no one loves you, for some reason, and you deserve to die for reasons that wouldn't mean death for other people. Opening up that worldview can make you kind of embarrassed about previous actions fueled by self-hatred because after the fact, they're sort of... weird. But imagine having the energy to deal with that embarrassment. Imagine it not ruining your week, not even your day. That's what proper medicating does-- breaks time-sucking bad thought loops, gives you energy, gives you space. Worth it. You will only change slowly, I promise. I found that it was much, much easier to deal with the shitty side of myself-- which, yeah, will still exist, sorry-- when facing it didn't leave me suicidal. Good luck. Congratulations for trying so hard.
