Hi, I'm a 21 college student and first time poster here. In truth I'm just looking for a place to vent, maybe find some answers because I'm genuinely unsure of my own well being.
In many ways I'm a typical guy in the sense that I don't talk about these things with friends, I've never mentioned it to family and they aren't the most perceptive on picking up on signs so if I have depression or not, I'm not sure. Maybe somebody here can tell me!
My "problems" if you will have occured in the past 3 years, prior to that I was a happy, upbeat kid. I enjoyed life, looked forward to the next day and life was great. Since then there was no single trigger that turned my life sour, but it was more of a combination of things.
It began with a string of grandparents deaths, 3 in the space of 9 months. For me, this was my first real experience of death and as I was adjusting to the situation of the first another one died. I didn't say a lot on either case, I didn't grieve openly and I wasn't sure how upset I was. All 3 were old and lived to a good age, I knew it would happen eventually and none of them happened in tragic circumstances so I should be thankful for that. I suppose it was just a matter of adjusting to it and understanding what was going on.
Shortly after that a former school friend of mine died, this one in tragic circumstances, hit by a car while drunk after a night club. Again, another person who I didn't have day to day dealings with so I was unsure how upset I was over it. I sort of scared me more than anything that people my age were dying, my mind seemed to be believe kids our age were infallible.
I thought I was coping fine with all this, I'm not sure why I thought that since I had no experience of coping with death before but regardless I did. Then a lot of things started creeping into my mind as the next year progressed. I started feeling more self-conscious, unhappy with my appearance. Then I started feeling paranoia about my eyesight, that it was slowly degrading, maybe because I had a serious illness and was going blind like a hypochondriac. I went to numerous doctors, did numerous tests. In the end there was nothing wrong with them at all and once I eventually accepted that myself this worry vanished, the pain and "impending blindness" was all in my head.
Not long after 2 more deaths occurred. Another friend of mine, this one somewhat closer died in tragic circumstances in a farming accident. I was difficult to take but again my reaction to hearing the news was not wanting to talk about it with anyone, I just didn't want to hear or talk about negative news. I'd let my subconscious worry about that, and worry it did.
I started getting anxiety attacks as I tried to sleep, my breathing got heavier and I started to fear that if I fell asleep I'd stop breathing. During the day I felt my chest get tighter when ever I was annoyed about something and breathing get heavier, I wondered how high my blood pressure must have been, I just wasn't in a good mental condition at all.
Then that summer my cat and best friend died in front of me unexpectedly, which was the most upsetting thing in my life. I remember crying that whole day, I had never shed a tear since I was 10 before that. It was so much harder to deal with, with friends and grandparents there were people around me mourning them, I wasn't alone but with this loss I was, the loss of my cat was all on me, it was shared with nobody.
That was 11 months ago, it was a difficult year dealing with that and one where I tried to avoid talking about it as much as possible. I never really reached any resolution with myself over it, I wished when I thought of him I felt happiness at the good times and not extreme sadness. I was lucky I had no regrets, but still a lot of sadness.
Then today I discovered my next door neighbours cat who was aged 16 has passed away. She may not have been our cat but she was like our cat, she came over here every day, took food off us, strolled into our house like she owned the place. Maybe she wasn't a family pet but she was a friend who I saw virtually every day for as long as I can remember. and yes, I'm a cat lover!
I can't remember a time when she wasn't here and tomorrow I will wake up knowing that she won't be outside, she won't climb in a window and run specially to my room to greet me, she won't leave a dead bird at my door thinking it's the greatest gift anyone could ever give.
So how I'll deal with that, I don't know. I can only hope I'll do so better than I have with every other problem I've faced up to this point.
Right now I'm not happy with the way things are. I'm feeling energy drained all the time, I'm not feeling motivated to work, play or do anything at all. I feel sad and down in the dumps most of the time. And I don't like feeling like this and yet another setback actually makes me worry where I'm going to end up. I have a year left in college, after that I need to get a job, I need to man up and I need to be able to motivate myself, the pressure knowing that doesn't help but its a reality.
So that brings me to posting here, sorry for such a long rant and if you read even half of it I'm really glad! But the reason I posted here is just some sort of discussion about what I'm going through and what I should do to get through it. The kind of discussion that I can't have with friends or family, yep typical guy keeping everything bottled up here.
My self confusion story. Is it depression? I'm not sure.
