10 Stages Of Being Depressed At The Office
1. Start your day by begrudgingly getting in the shower, shaving, et cetera. While the warm water soothes your body, you forget how actually depressed you are about your coming day. But it is there, like a dull pain, creating an edge in you. Forget your depression while you say goodbye to your fiancé and dog. Enjoy the sun while walking to the bus. Listen to the woman with the ‘London’ accent who works in oil & gas and also teaches yoga who is incredibly happy and laughs a lot and talks so warmly with the person she sits next to on the bus. Look at the older brick buildings of lower downtown, the skyline. Look at the river your bus drives over.
2. Arrive early to work and look at the internet and drink your Starbucks. Eat your cottage cheese and green vitamins. As you begin to work, feel suicidal thoughts come into your brain. Consider how Edgar Allan Poe died after being found belligerent and ill in the streets. Consider he wasn’t much older than you at that point. Think, “Well, I could just finish editing my unpublished novels and then just self-destruct.” Imagine, a five-year plan ending with your death. But you’re getting married. You love her, yes. Your depression is separate from her, but you think of the fight you just had. How she gets when she gets angry. How that just being in love actually isn’t a cure to unhappiness, or depression, or anything. Love is good, but at this point: the unending pain of life, disappointment of self, self-destructive desire, and hatred of self, overcomes all of this. Depression can be described as anger turned inwards. You’ve punched yourself in the head before (not at work), but it didn’t help then, and gave you a headache. Drinking helps, but makes it worse. Your therapist says it’s like burning your hand to forget about another pain. And being hungover is sometimes better than being depressed. Of course, you know that you just end up more depressed. But remember Edgar Allan Poe.
3. Actually work and try and not to think of yourself, but it is there—depression and a wish for this pain to stop. You realize that moods come and go, and when in a depressed mood, it feels horrible, but you know that eventually your mood will change. Wish you were busy. Wish you hadn’t finished most of you work. Wish that your work wasn’t mindless. Wish you were dead. Wish you didn’t have this knotted muscle in your neck.
4. Talk to a coworker about work and say you’re fine (when asked) and try to ease out of your frown to a smile, or semblance of. When you say goodbye, thank them also, and try and have a warm tone to your voice. Once they leave, feel the knotted muscle in your neck and consider how you can make it through next 7.5 hours of the day. Luckily, your 20 ounces of Starbucks has 13 ounces still in it. Once that’s gone, the mild high will be too.
5. Don’t text your fiancé or best friend existentialist-pain texts because it will just cause pain to them (and then you later when you have to discuss it when your mood is no longer depressed), and you’ll come off like you have borderline disorder. Write an essay instead, which also seems to have the same characteristics.
6. After using the bathroom, look at yourself in the mirror with your worn-khaki pants and V-neck sweater, hiding the wrinkled and worn American Apparel polo shirt underneath, and feel less than. Less than the wealthy business people dressed nice, showing their wealth through dress, to the jobs where they use their minds, with the degrees that they earned, with the salaries (not hourly wage) that afford more than a 500 square foot apartment and a 15-year-old truck with a crack windshield, screeching brakes and a tire constantly losing air. People who can get a $3,000 line-of-credit from the bank without their father cosigning because they never had a judgment against them. And if they did, and paid it off, as you had—would know you have to call the 3 credit bureaus and have them take off the judgment from your credit report. That the fucking judgment will not just go away even though the legal document said that it would be dropped “with prejudice” once paid. Financial ignorance is not bliss. Fuck!
7. Realize the transcript you scanned, on the new copiers, was skewed and it needs to be redone. Like your life. It seems death and reincarnation is like a reset button on a video game, but with a new self-grasping “I”, but the same soul, or inner-most mind, making death not an end to suffering but a continuum of it (Samsara and a Buddha sitting outside of it).
8. Try and think of ways to make your life better. Consider the negative inertia you create in your life. You grin and bear it. You don’t outwardly whine, or complain, just have a grim face and grim mind. Your parents taught you integrity. They taught you not to whine. They taught you that you have to do things you don’t want to do because that’s how life works. You’re silent of your pain, but feel people see it on your face. You worry your moodiness makes you seem crazy, or unstable. You feel crazy and unstable. You really no longer want to feel.
9. Take a nap on your lunch break because consciousness is too much.
10. Drink a cup of office coffee after lunch in hopes of mood improvement. The afternoon is endless, and your life is horrible. Until 5 pm, at least.