Just spent the last 15 minutes or so reading about this - and dear God is it depressing. So, I really am evil, horrible trash who doesn't deserve to live? Everything is horrible and will never get better? Everything is a lies, illusions, and covert slavery and there's no possible escape? Everyone is really out to get you and will destroy you at the slightest provocation? There is no happiness or calm that isn't an illusion or rely on complete stupidity?

I don't even consider myself especially optimistic but I have a hard time even believing this...I definitely don't know how to survive if this is reality, it's too horrifying. And forget anything in regard to myself...I deserve to die in the most painful, traumatic way possible if everything I think about myself is true. I definitely don't have any positive illusions - I know exactly how despicable and undeserving I am. I know my self-hate is rational and nothing short of perfection can cure it.

Someone writing about depressive realism explained thus: "If so, the concept of depression may—at least in some cases—be turned onto its head and positively redefined as something like ‘the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating’." Except I was depressed long before someone explained this to me (I still don't see the "absurdity"), and what's most distressing is that there is no valid recovery. You are not allowed to find a way around this. Any positive perspective is a lie, or an illusion. If you are intelligent, you must be depressed at all times. It is literally WRONG to ever feel a sense of meaning, love, or peace, because anything other than misery is delusion. "If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we'd be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning". Delusion is supposedly required to live and function - and that makes me enraged and disgusted. I can't keep living like this. I'm weak and disgusting and I don't know what to do.

Yet the writer continues with this: "Yet the question of the meaning of life is the most important question that a person can ask, and the realization that life might be lived differently is bound to provoke a depressive reaction, a harsh winter that yet may be followed by a beautiful spring." I already know there are alternatives, but are they valid? I've already stressed all this crap before, and gone partially numb to it. Otherwise, it makes me angry and painfully anxious, and just in so much hurt. I'm feeling it right now: what's the best way to live? How can I live free of reprehension? Hell if I know. I'm not sure if I'm even angry at the world for sucking or at myself for having to be shown that it sucks.

The annoying thing is that so many articles about DR have this tinge of "the mentally ill are superior because we see how things really are, unlike those weak, delusional normal people who need their silly, childish fantasies to survive". And that irritates me, because I certainly can't identify it. If I am realistic, all it does is kill me. It's just so backwards...especially considering measured and observed results that positive beliefs con often lead to positive outcomes. It just doesn't make sense...the "more accurate" view is more damaging? That shouldn't be right.

Dammit, I don't want to be pessimistic. I don't want to be optimistic either. And I never bought the "pessimism is realism" line. I'm someone who habitually lives disconnected from reality: only now that I spend so much time online am I even as aware of things. I still wasn't happy, but I was a bit calmer. I don't see myself as realistic in the least unless we're talking self-evaluation. I don't know **** about the outer world - it's terrifying. I'm something of an idealist and fantasist by nature, admittedly prone to magical thinking that I've basically been training out of myself because pride. I simply don't understand the "way things really are". I just don't understand it - what am I seeing, or missing? I don't know anymore. I'm not even sure where this post is going.