So this blog premise was marked down a while back – I suspect earlier this year. I don’t even feel like it’s that relevant anymore, but I thought it would be interesting to write about it in hindsight.
As established elsewhere, I have since determined that I’ve been depressed much of the time over the last handful of years. I’ve also determined that the primary cause of this depression was a deep-seated insecurity and feeling of inadequacy.
Increasingly, this had manifested as a sinking feeling in my stomach along with anxiety and other depressive symptoms.
I think it’s very common for these types of insecurities to be dealt with by simply repressing them. The more successfully you can repress them, the better you feel. Its temporary impact is lessened and you can more readily enjoy whatever you’re doing.
Clearly, this is not permanently sustainable and eventually results in things like full-blown depression and anhedonia.
In my case I think that when I was alone I was forced to confront it. I wasn’t able to repress it any longer and the feelings came up and manifested as anxiety, among other things.
This seems pretty obvious to me now. It definitely wasn’t then. It’s actually pretty amazing how effective it has been for me to just methodically work through all these things on my own. With the insights I’ve made, I feel like most of my behavior and feelings in the past can be easily explained.
I’m also excited to realize that most of this insecurity has pretty much gone away. I rarely feel like I used to.
It’s as if simply shining a light on the problem made it go away. It used to thrive in the shadows but now that I’m aware of it and can rationally determine that it doesn’t even make sense, it’s a lot easier to make it go away.
So I really just wanted to address this particular blog prompt because I think it’s just quite interesting how things have changed in a relatively short amount of time. It’s nice to feel like progress has been made.
It’s also just fun to realize that something that seemed super mysterious and perplexing just a few short months ago is now so obvious to me.