I feel like I’ve become a very apathetic person. I hate to bring up severe depression as a reason for it but I don’t know what else to attribute it to. It’s very easy for me to stop contacting people and fall out of friendships. By easy, I just mean I feel numb about it. I don’t feel anything about it. Similarly, it’s hard to care about issues in the world. I have moments where I feel like I truly care and see how messed up everything is and then moments where I just actually don’t care and would just prefer to ignore it. Which really makes me feel like crap. Similarly if I’m not speaking with someone and I’m on bad terms with them, I honestly don’t feel like I care about them and I have thoughts that I don’t care if they live or die and I can’t tell if they’re real thoughts or not. It honestly feels like they are real thoughts. I’ve found I’ve done a couple of good things recently just to avoid the guilt of not doing them. It feels like my support and care for the world is performative at times or to prove I’m not a bad person. I feel like a robot. I want to care but I just don’t feel it. I can cry and feel pain but I can’t care that much about stuff other than the stuff in my head and just feel emotional flatness in conversations and around people.
Am I just a really bad case of emotional numbness/anhedonia? I just wish I didn’t have to think or be a person because I do it all wrong. I feel cold and heartless. I don’t know what happened to me to make me like this. How is it possible to want to keep living when you have a problem like this. What is the solution for this? I’ve talked to my therapist about feeling like I didn’t care about people or things and he told me that I was burying my feelings. Another therapist told me if I was a cold person that I wouldn’t care about being a cold person. But I worry that’s not the truth.
At this point, I’ve been diagnosed with a lot of different things. Quiet borderline personality, bipolar II, and I’ve wondered if I have autism because I identify with a lot of traits. I just can’t seem to break through the black cloud of numbness and sadness and exhaustion I feel everyday. I don’t know where it comes from. Showering and finishing laundry is hard. Things shouldn’t be this hard. Why are things so hard including caring?
I just really wish I could understand. I wish I could just quiet my mind and not have to think about this stuff. I wish I was normal.