Every time I try to describe my lack of motivation to other people, it’s amazing how I always see the same look of a lack of understanding. They just have a hard time comprehending not having the drive to do critical things. And I can’t say I understand it fully either. All I know is that something just isn’t there. It’s not a case of not wanting to go to work on a Monday, it’s having no desire or drive to brush your teeth, or eat, or even take your daily meds, even though you understand that there will be consequences. It’s a bit like hunger, in that you don’t decide to be hungry, you check what your body is telling you. You don’t decide to have a base level of motivation, you just have it. Or you don’t.

It’s crazy because if you asked me “What’s the one thing that defines your life up to this point?”, my answer -since I was about 16- would be “depression”. And yet I still, roughly 10 years later, have some feeling of doubt about actually saying that I have “depression”.

I think that part of it is that the words are used far more loosely than, say, physical illnesses. It’s not uncommon for people to say “I’m feeling depressed this week” or “I’ve been feeling anxious lately”. That’s fine because it’s just how language is, but I would definitely say there’s a difference between that and living with depression or anxiety.

The hope when starting this tumblr is that, in some way, it would help me. One way is that I find that the process of writing down a problem causes me to think about it in ways I perhaps wouldn’t have.

Like I’ve realized recently that a lot of my struggle comes from me trying to please the “Stranger”; this hypothetical onlooker who will judge me or my actions.

I’ve always thought that this was a good thing, because it makes one very careful of what one believes. When you start to accept something, the Stranger chimes in, purposefully trying to find a way that what I’m accepting is completely wrong. The end effect is that I feel as though I’m able to view most things from more than one point of view. Perhaps not all of them, but at least multiple. This does, however, severely limit what I believe concretely; nearly everything is up for debate with the Stranger.