i had a life

I don't know what it means to have a life. We all have a life, right? What kind of value judgment is this? Right? I'm not sure, over the past few years, I've come to feel that I have one. For all the years prior, I felt that I did not. In Vermont, I finally had goals and ambitions, in such a way that was socially connected. I felt socially connected.

It's not a value judgment, but an important component of good mental health. Introverts are no exception. Rather they just need to be more careful and measured about it. During the pandemic, studies showed that it was actually introverts who suffered the most from the social regulations. Our careful measured connections can be more fragile, more easily thwarted, and far more difficult to replace.

Throw a wrecking ball through that, and it's introverts who start hanging themselves. Extroverts don't have a greater need, they're just far better at meeting it. When you're so much of an introvert that you're on the spectrum, it's all the more severe.

I complicate everything trying to understand it, hoping that understanding empowers me, but it's not always so complicated. I had a life. I don't have a life here. To go from having a life back to not having one is massively depressing. Of course I'm having trouble getting to the gym and everything else. Nothing I can do is going to help, so I'm just trapped in a downward spiral of drifting further and further away from what it felt like to be alive.

Depression is like acid. We're forced to watch everything we are slowly burned away. I was beating it, but now I'm back to drowning in it. That life that I left behind was all about beating depression.