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For the first time in a while, I'm going to try and unpack what might have caused my depression to begin with, working backwards through each incident and getting to the root cause. I haven't been advised to do this, but I feel I have to in order to try escaping from it.
Not releasing music by the deadlines I promised both myself and what semblance of an audience I have. I have numbed myself to the concept of deadlines to such an extent that I can no longer do anything on time. Including washing, cooking, waking up, going to sleep, everything.
The time I should spend doing these things is spent dissociating. Wishing time wasn't passing and distracting myself from it by intentionally wasting time. My brain is so fucking hooked on wasting time that it looks like I'm addicted to YouTube, gaming, social media...
... anything that sinks time, basically. And it's like this no matter the task. Last year, I failed to release music after my second attempt at launching myself in as many years because I had a nervous breakdown over having to return to a studio to re-record vocals, and...
... because I simply couldn't get things sounding the way I thought they should. I became embarrassed at my own incompetence, and failed to release even an instrumental track because I had no system or guarantee in place that I could follow it up with anything. So I sat on it...
... and became even more depressed. I kept on hearing clicks and pops in the audio renders - which I swear were real, so I bought a new computer, thinking it would make me happy. It didn't. I then bought a new laptop, thinking that would make me happy. It didn't. So I bought...
... another, and still, nothing. And then my cryptocurrency investments hit the floor and I found myself with very little money, just as the world shut down due to C16. My grandfather died. My mother's best friend died. All the studios closed. I couldn't record. I sank deeper...
... and deeper. I blamed myself for not moving out before this happened. I chastised myself for listening to my parents when I should have just said "fuck them" and moved out. I promised my friends I'd join them in Manchester, and it just fell through. Now whenever they talk...
... to me, they joke about it. They think it's funny, and I try to play along and laugh it off, but all I feel is a deep sense of guilt and shame. When I think about the headstart I could have had by just persevering, all I feel is guilt and shame. When I think about how much...
... of a parasite I have become, I feel guilt and shame. So much that I have, in recent months, felt like killing myself. I have not sought help until just last week. The medical system in my country is long past the point of failure, so my ability to get an appointment is...
... pretty severely impaired. Even before this - all the way from me first joining Twitter in September 2019 - I joked about depression. I only bought my music software legit in the August of last year, on PayPal credit that I still owe back to them. This was immediately after...
... my almost-minimum-wage coffee job collapsed from under me, as I saw how deeply unfairly I was being treated as the newest recruit to the team, and was effectively given a final warning, taking the decision to resign before an inevitable firing. The preceding seven months...
... was a deeply miserable experience. I stayed on that team out of sheer loyalty, and after inadequate circumstances and questionable management had us fail two internal assessments and made my job impossible, my head was placed firmly on the chopping block as an easy...
... scapegoat. Ultimately, I couldn't even hold down a fucking café job, one that I only took out of depressed desperation to begin with. The second half of 2018 was spent recovering after a breakdown, following my first big attempt to launch into making music. I was...
... dissatisfied after spending an obscene quantity of time and energy trying to cobble together something coherent from a series of bad vocal takes, recorded over four or five sessions. I just fucking couldn't get them sounding right and went berserk trying. It drove me to...
... the point of total nervous decline; I felt inadequate, like my life up to that point had been a lie, and that I'd been lying to myself and everyone else about wanting to and being capable of doing music full-time. I took a long break from it, only coming back after I'd...
... found some kind of job security to support a second attempt, and once I'd recovered enough to re-open FL Studio and work out exactly where I went wrong. This took the better part of a year. As soon as I moved home, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, 11-12 years...
... after her previous battle with the disease. I couldn't leave home, but worse than that, I couldn't properly deal or come to terms with what I'd been through in the past year, let alone recover from it; my parents believe they're supportive, but all they ever do is cast...
... doubt on my ability to make good decisions independently, make me dependent by encouraging me to stay at home, and imply if not outright state that I have no right to feel as bad as I do - and how dare I express it? How selfish am I for talking about something as trivial...
... as my feelings when my mother had cancer? I dealt with that from mid-2018 to late 2019. To this day, they blame me, telling me that I have "no credibility" because I've failed to release any music. Prior to my 2018 attempt, I had a job at my university's students' union as...
... an elected officer chosen by the university's student population in a general election. Winning that election made me so happy; I felt like I could and would do anything for the wonderful friends to whom I'd promised real and positive change in their lives as students. But...
... four months into my elected tenure, a series of active attempts to demoralise, humiliate, destabilise and eventually fire me from the position had already been made not just by the dirty fucking traitors on my team, but members of upper management conspiring to silence an...
... individual they saw as a loose cannon. I had never been disloyal, but they tried so hard to fabricate technicalities on which to penalise me that in the aftermath of a disciplinary hearing, I was given a choice between taking a bung of £5000 and leaving, or staying on...
... with a two-strike warning. I took the cowardly path and bailed, signing an agreement to vanish and never speak of it again, on pain of legal action. I couldn't go to my friends for comfort. I couldn't explain why I had to break my promises to them, and I had to live...
... humiliated by my own cowardice. This set up a pattern that I have unintentionally followed for the last three years, and now, the toll it has taken on my mental well-being has almost destroyed me. I've run out of tweets in this thread, but... there it all is, I guess. Sorry.
tl;dr I'm depressed because I've never forgiven myself for not being good enough in my own estimation at anything, this having been reinforced by all the jobs I've been bad or treated unfairly at, as well as the inadequacies of my living situation and compounded by the lockdown.
