notablackbarbie,

I wish you felt so much better about life and yourself than you do right now. It is possible for that to change, even if you cannot see how or why. And if that changes, all the "reasons" and "evidence" that seem to prove the truth of what you feel will also change. And then you will be living in an entirely different reality, and you will have an entirely different reality reflected back to you from others.

I believe you need to hear right now that your brain, that all your emotions and thoughts, are telling you lies, and that at many times, maybe almost every waking moment, you do not have the power anymore to challenge those lies. You need to hear that it is all lies, and also that you cannot fight against them the way you would against lies coming from outside.

But I know that hearing this can also be incredibly invalidating, as if what you were feeling and thinking is not real or justified. But it is real and it is justified. The pain comes from somewhere and does in some way reflect some sad realities. There are good reasons to feel the way you do, and it would be cruel to say that you should not feel that way.

But you do not know where your depressive and shameful emotions and thoughts really come from, and so, instead of dealing with the source in the way you are capable of, you have been spinning your wheels for so long that all you can conclude is that everything is wrong, and especially everything about yourself.

This all happens to us depressives, and even non-depressives, without our being aware of it. There are parts of our brain that are devoted to surviving crises, and when a crisis is sensed, those parts take over. They hijack our conscious thoughts and feelings. But when the crisis is not plain to see, or we perceive something that resembles a past crisis, those parts of the brain cannot solve the problem, so we are constantly in a state of crisis. And depression has been well described as being caused by the belief that you have problems that cannot be solved.

You also need to hear that it is not your fault for getting stuck in this, that it does not mean you are weak or fatally flawed. It is a hazard of being human in a world that is often just plain dangerous. You are a survivor. You have what it takes to survive, and that means you also have what it takes to make the most of the life given to you.