field notes: waking with last night's makeup on
An honest chat about the many forms that depression can take on
Welcome to field notes, my casual blogging platform within my Substack Messy Dialectic. If you are looking for refined essays and discourse, check here for the latest posts. If you love rambling, brain dumps, and chit-chats about life experiences, then continue reading on.
2024 was a year of few ups, and several intense downs. Downs so intense that I became doomed to never return to the state that I was prior to the year’s existence. I can say that from these many downs, I certainly learned a lot, but what shocked me most were my revelations on depression.
I started the year with the loss of my cat, the loss of a couple of opportunities, and a betrayal that rocked me to my core. Now that nearly a year has passed since that betrayal, I have realized that it was depression in the form of anger that had metabolized into the form of depression as a result of my anger having no choice but to be stuffed down and swallowed into the days and months that had followed.
In the middle of the year, I felt the ebbs and flows of grief as life continued to go on after the loss of my childhood cat; the loss of my first best friend. Everything that I had ever done was punctuated by her existence, so I felt lost as I tried partaking in my habits and living my life without her presence. With everything in my life, I’ve had to remake every single habit from scratch to accommodate for a world in which she no longer exists, and the toll that it has taken to start my life over has weighed on me heavily. That in itself was its own form of depression.
Then, my birthday came, and it was my first birthday without my lil baby, but also my first birthday trip (and first vacation in the first place to be honest). I had decided to go camping, and at the end of my trip I had experienced “post vacation depression” which left me crying every single day for a couple of days. It really messed with my head, and left me wondering if I ever wanted to go on vacation ever again at the risk of feeling that heart wrenching pain again. I still remember how upset I was packing everything up and doing the three hour drive back home, only to just sit still on my couch in a heap of sadness from the end of my off-the-grid adventure. Now that a few months have passed, I can say with confidence that I will certainly go on vacation again. I can just go now with the knowledge of the sad feelings that will inevitably come at the end of the adventure.
At the end of 2024, I moved into my new spot (yay!) that I love dearly. It’s incredibly spacious and a great upgrade that’ll lend itself perfect for all of the life changes coming my way. But wow, here I was yet again, floored by depression. It was from this move that I learned about “relocation depression,” a phenomenon that I had never heard of or anticipated. From what I learned, it’s essentially a form of depression that is not classified in the DSM-5 that relates to you simply getting depression symptoms from moving into a new home/space/etc. It doesn’t matter if the move is good for you, if you’re excited, or even if it was a dire move that needed to happen. The relocation depression can still get you, and it can definitely debilitate you, take it from me.
In 2024, I learned that apparently, you can get depression from literally anything.
Any life change, good or bad, can cause you to fall victim to a sort of sadness that unfortunately, our human brain worms do like to feed on and use as information relating to the situation that currently in. Then, if we don’t fight against the sadness (of course as much as we can in the moment, I know it’s hard at times) and we just believe in what our brain worms are telling us, then that can serve to amplify the sadness that we’re feeling, and in turn make our lives even more upsetting or stressful.
These learnings really shocked me, and have definitely made me realize that going into 2025, I need much more stability in my life, but not just any stability. I need stable joys that I can depend on especially as I am architecting my new year to be a year of metamorphosis into the creative woman who I have deep-down aspired to be ever since I was a little girl. I do fear that all of this rapid and intense transformation and change will cause my being to falter and crumble at times due to how much our human brains love sameness, so I hope to get into some really good habits that keep me filled with a nice steady dopamine release that keeps me going as I work on myself.
I’m really excited about where I’ll be by the end of 2025, and I can’t wait to see all of my creative ideas and projects through. It’s gonna be really incredible, I just know it.