I'm Back! (Trigger Warning: NVGR, Whining, Depressive Stuff)

9:57 AM on 08.07.2014 (server time)0

Hi people,
Your friendly neighborhood CaimDark is back. Not that anybody notices, but the reason I abruptly stopped commenting and my blogs disappeared is that I pulled a Kyosuke and asked Andy to nuke my account about a month ago. Not because "Dtoid sucks now", but because I was using Disqus and Dtoid compulsively, and I needed drastic measures to stay away. I stayed in the forums to keep a link to the community and because it took very little of my time anyways. A month later, I'm already back, how pathetic is that? I even commented with an old fake Facebook account I'd made to make registrations easier but rarely used it, though in my defense the ban did help me drastically lower Disqus and Dtoid procrastination.

It didn't help with the real problems, though, and what the hell, now I'm back. I make no guarantees that I won't ask for another ban after a month, because I'm weird and in a weird moment. Basically my life feels like it's falling apart. Last year my wife got cancer, and she changed so much, apparently I failed her so much and our relationship strained to the point where it now feels 10 years of love are over just like that. We haven't decided on a divorce yet because everything is too raw to make such a drastic decision, but after being repeatedly told she doesn't see the light at the end of the tunnel, I'm starting to believe her. She moved out and we're sort of taking a break. "Sort of" because we regularly talk and see each other, our day to day relationship is mostly great, we enjoy each others' company, but on the rare occasions our relationship comes out, it's like we the fun we and joy we have together is suddenly erased and she only speaks tragedy and disgrace and hopelessness. I gave up trying to understand. Did I mention there's no more sex? For 10 years, we were all over each other like two horny rabbits, then cancer came, fried her insides, killed her libido and made any sort of penetration hurt her like hell. Fun!

I've been suffering from depression for 10 years, and with the weight of life events, it only seems to be getting worse. The last 10 years of my life often feel like one giant waste, even though everybody who loves me tells me otherwise. Ironically, now, starting my 30s, I play way more videogames than I did as a teenager, because back then I was a healthy teenager, now I'm a depressed loser (yes I'm feeling sorry for myself and having a little pity party, please let me. Thank you!).

I wish I had a physical disease that showed up in an exam so I could appease my conscience. It would also help with society, sure, but most of the society that really matters to me, family, friends, maybe soon-to-be-ex-wife, is incredibly loving and supportive, and thinks far better of me than I do of myself. It's becoming increasingly more accepted that depression is a real thing and not something easily fixed with "willpower" any more than a paraplegic can't will himself to run.

And yet... is it? The guilt and doubt is always there. Psychiatrists diagnose depression based on symptoms that are easy to fake, and people do "game the system". How can people really be sure I'm wasting my life away because I'm sick, or because I'm just lazy and using this supposed depression as a crutch?

I struggle with the question myself. Sometimes I feel like I have to take the blame myself, otherwise it's easy and tempting not to take responsibility for anything. Other times I want to blame the disease so that I don't feel like a waste of space all the time. Surely there's a healthy balance somewhere, but I haven't found it yet.

Ever since this started, I've been wandering and stumbling around, philosophically and literally, looking for "something" to make sense of my life. The only true love I had is my wife, and I'm about to lose that. The other things that are supposed to be important in life... I want to want them because I found no alternative, but don't *really*, *truly*, want them, does that make sense?

Probably motivated by this search for "something", in the last 10 years I've dabbled in Psychology, capitalism, tried different countries. I tried staying away from distractions like videogames and the Internet, dabbled in music, etc, and last I came to Norway to study a bachelor's degree in a Norwegian university entirely in Norwegian without knowing the language and having to learn it in one year or be literally booted out, because why not, right?. I stumble and fumbled, but despite everything I'm now staring at just one more year to finally finish a degree, and I'm terrified I won't be able to handle it.

But no matter what I do or where I go, nothing really helps, which convinced me that whatever my problem is, it's entirely in my own head. If all that sounds like whining, that's because it is. I just want to vent with my Dtoid friends, I'm fully aware my "tragedies" don't come anywhere near many of the real tragedies many other people face, and yet knowing that Ebola is killing people like flies in Africa and knowing my own privilege somehow doesn't make my pain any better. Go figure!

Being shy and married and depressed is a deadly combination to one's social life, being shy and married and depressed and a foreigner among polite but cold Norwegians even more so. Now the married part is gone too, so it's just little me, which is part of the reason I came back. At least I can have a community here, if only to talk about stupid videogames.

TL;DR I'm officially back!