I’ve been away from my blog adjusting to the medication increase – Quetiapine, if you haven’t been following along.

It has helped my anxiety more than I can properly explain. It isn’t gone – I’ve still had two massive panic attacks in Lidl – but it’s different now. It’s not constant. It’s not humming under everything. When I use coping mechanisms on the walk home, they actually work. That hasn’t been true for years.

For a long time my anxiety was daily. Intrusive. Agitated. Sometimes paranoid. It woke up with me and went to sleep with me. It was exhausting. And now it’s quieter.

The strange thing is that once the anxiety stepped back, something else stepped forward.

The depression didn’t suddenly get worse. It was always here, it’s why i had my meds increased to begin with. It just wasn’t the loudest voice in the room. Without that frantic engine running in the background, what’s left is slowness. Weight. A severe lack of motivation. Even small tasks feel like I’m wearing a weighted vest while sleep deprived.

If I look back to December, I can see I’m not as far down the Black Hole’s tube of circles as I was. The Bad Passive Bad Thoughts™ aren’t screaming anymore. They’ve dropped to a dull, existential hum: I don’t know what the point of my life is.

Quieter. But still heavy.

What Depression Actually Costs

Unless you’ve lived through depression – especially bipolar depression – it’s easy to underestimate the effort it takes to maintain the bare minimum. From the outside, it can look like “high functioning.” I’m not bed rotting. I’m sort of feeding myself. I’m going to Lidl. I’m tackling laundry mountain. But what people don’t see is the cost.

My flat collapses into entropy faster than I can manage it. I clean the kitchen “yesterday” and discover it was actually four days ago. Time stretches and contracts strangely when you’re depressed. Days blur. I’m still recovering from the effort of four days ago.

The laundry doesn’t shrink. It just divides into two mountains instead – one dirty, one clean – because I run out of energy halfway through and can’t face putting it away.

Take it further and it gets smaller. I forget to drink water. I delay sleep. Eating becomes complicated – and because I’m in recovery from an ED, that complication has extra layers I won’t unpack here. I’m spinning plates just to exist as a human being with constant needs. And when you’re depressed, you don’t even care if they fall.

It isn’t laziness. It’s friction. Everything has friction.

The hardest part is that there’s no reward. Anhedonia steals it. I tackle laundry mountain and feel… nothing. Not pride. Not relief. Just, well, I guess I did that. BUT I should be doing more. This is NOT enough.

Even gaming – something that’s supposed to help – starts to feel like another mountain. If I spend all my energy fighting entropy in the kitchen, I don’t have enough left to climb Timberwolf Mountain. Apparently I’m done dealing with mountains for now.

Sleep Is for the Blessed

My relationship with sleep during depression is chaotic.

Sometimes I can’t sleep. Sometimes I oversleep. Sometimes I delay it on purpose because I don’t want to wake up and do this again tomorrow. And sometimes I’m just awake at 4am because time slipped through my fingers and I didn’t notice. There’s a specific shame that comes with watching the clock flip to 4:03am and realising you’ve broken your “2am rule” again.

Crying is worse in bed, for some reason. My depression has geography-based opinions about where it prefers to express itself. The living room is apparently acceptable. The bed is catastrophic. What am I crying about? The Stuff and Things. The grief I haven’t fully confronted. The loneliness. The friends who preferred a smaller version of me. The fear that if I don’t shrink, everyone leaves.

I know a lot of this is depression talking. But in the moment, it feels true.

“No one likes me. No one cares. Everyone leaves.”

It’s a convincing constant narrator. Even when I try and “But WeeGee loved me”, it reminds me that she’s gone too and I sit missing her even more.

Who Am I Without the Anxiety?

This part is harder to explain.

For years, I convinced myself that the anxiety was just my personality. That grief had permanently rewired me into someone agitated and hypervigilant. I adapted around it. I built routines around it. I survived inside it. Now that it’s quieter, I don’t know who I am without it.

Quetiapine is known for helping anxiety before depression. So I’m in this strange in-between space – less anxious, still deeply depressed – and neither state feels like the real me. It’s not anxious me. It’s not stable me. It’s depressed me.

And that creates this weird identity gap.

The relief is still real and noticeable, though. I can sit and play The Long Dark without being yanked out of it by intrusive thoughts about impending doom. My baseline isn’t permanently set to agitated anymore. When I panic, I can soothe it. That is new. That is huge.

But the quiet has space in it. And in that space, grief is louder.

Why I Hide

When I’m far down the tube of circles, I hide. It isn’t dramatic. It’s conservation. I can barely keep up with what’s happening inside these four walls – I don’t have capacity for outside noise. I’ve always hidden during episodes. But it used to feel different.

WeeGee and I bonded over hiding. When she disappeared into her bubble, I thought about her constantly. I knew she was there. Waiting. Loving me quietly. When I hid, I knew she was thinking about me too.

We’d send small gifts sometimes – proof of existence. But even without that, I felt her there. Because of her, hiding never felt like isolation. When one of us resurfaced, it was like no time had passed. Blogging. Talking. Being loud about our AWESOME finds. It would just… resume.

Now when I hide, there isn’t someone out there waiting. And that changes everything. I’m grieving her at a time when, in the past, I would have hidden from her. That feels backwards. I feel the emptiness of the lack of Royal Mail knocking on my door with a package reminding me she is waiting, and I miss feeling her out there, waiting.

Existing As I Am.

I’m not sure the point of this post. It kind of wrote itself. I am not writing this for sympathy. I’m writing it because disappearing every time my brain shifts gears hasn’t made it easier.

Maybe I don’t have to vanish just because I’m slow. Or heavy. Or unsure who I am in the quiet. Maybe my comfortability can matter too, and I can post that I exist because I want to.

Maybe I can just show up like this. Authentically depressed, because I am.

And thanks in advance, for accepting me as I am. Through hiding, existing, mood changes, silence and even managing to sneak video game based metaphors into a post like this.

“I’ve been silent for so long”