Every New Year's Eve I find myself at some point saying/mumbling/thinking "Well, it can't be any worse than this past year." And every New Year's Eve, I realize that the last time I said that, I was wrong.
Here's to hopefully being right at least once.
When you're depressed, the New Year isn't a cause for celebration. For me, at least, it's cause for gritting teeth, hunching shoulders a little tighter, and ratcheting up the 'endure' meter a little higher. I find people who aren't and have never been severely depressed just can't understand that.
I remember vaguely when New Year's Eve was a cause for celebration; celebration at having made it a little farther on down the timeline, and a hopeful attempt to meet the oncoming year with optimism. Nowadays? Not so much. See, all New Year is to me at this point is a reminder that another year has gone by - and I'm still no better off. Unfortunately, I was raised as a fairly strict rational thinker, and to me, all that means is 'trend.' I've had people try to tell me that 'past experiences are no guarantee of future results' but you see that phrase was invented to describe processes and things that are stochastic. That's the point of such things. But life, to me, isn't at all stochastic. It's entirely dependent on what has happened before. Humans can't think about things without thinking about history or cause.
So this is one reason I purely hate the holidays. I have typically used up all my teeth-gritted tolerance of happy people and optimism around Christmas time, and by New Year's Eve there really just isn't much left.
This and other reasons are what lead me into the nasty circle of depression and self-hate. I got a telephone call today, from one of my oldest friends. I've known him over 88% of my life, I think. He got married a year and a half ago to a nice lady. He was the last of my close friends who had been unmarried, and he got married. I stepped a little further out into the mist. But that's not important. He was calling to tell me that he and his wife have managed to successfully adopt a newborn baby. I think I was one of the early phone calls, which flattered me. But that's not important. My reaction at the time on the phone was to shout congratulations over the phone and listen to to the two of them offer some garbled details on their current situation and how it had happened and how wonderful it was, before offering both of them my love and my best wishes so that they could get off the phone with me and call/notify other people.
Then I cried.
I'd like to say it was from happiness for them, but that would be a lie. I am happy for them. But the reaction once off the phone was purely a reaction to my feeling myself slip further out of the world, further away from the people who are my friends. I don't know what it says about me that my close friends from the first half of my life are now all married and most are parents, and that I am pretty much the only one left who is not, but I'm sure I won't like whatever it is that it does say.
The tears really aren't self-pity.
They're self-hatred, at the fact that my overriding reaction to the news is self-pity.
That's what depression is. It's fundamentally selfish. This doesn't make you the sufferer selfish. Indeed, my depression is worsened by the fact that I spend lavishly of what energy I have to be congratulatory and not be the miserable bastard at the party. But the depression itself is selfish. I can say that my first reaction to the news, privately, was one of sadness and misery. I consider myself a minimally acceptable human because the first (and only publicly visible) external response I generated was not one of sadness and misery. But I consider myself a fully fucking broken human being because that was my reaction.
I know this doesn't make any sense. If it doesn't, to you, then please consider yourself lucky.