 Speaking for myself...
...when I get really flat emotionally and lose interest in everything, that is paradoxically (or maybe not so paradoxically) also the time I start having thoughts of wanting to die, or just disappear.
The surface of my life is a desert, but underground, there is a whole lot going on.
The lack of any meaningful interface between the underground and the surface leads to feelings of futility and hopelessness, and to invalidating my thoughts and feelings before they even have a chance to surface to consciousness.
Most attempts to interface with the outside world end up less than satisfactorily, and so the cumulative effect is to gradually extinguish the attempts. It's a self-referring loop of diminishing desire due to "learned helplessness."
I'm a lot older than you, "B," and I don't begin to have the answer to this. I do, however, have a deep respect for the profound darkness and alienation we humans can fall into, and I've experienced how the remarks of people who haven't been there come across, well-meaning though they undoubtedly are.
"Just get help" is a very ironic statement to me, as if one could buy help for the human condition in the psychological marketplace, even with unlimited money.
If you are not self-medicating, even with coffee, right now, that speaks of quite a bit of inner strength to work with, it seems to me.
Sometimes this kind of strength works against us, because if we start on a healthier path (for us!) and begin to thaw some of the frozen feelings, those around us think we're falling apart, and anxiously try to get the genie back in the bottle.
I'm not so sure psychiatry isn't doing the same thing with medication, many times. And how many friends are up to the challenge? They have their own stuff!
We live in a culture that just flat doesn't accept the human condition--even normal ageing, much less depression, grief, and feelings of not wanting to exist.
I think finding the courage to process hellish feelings is the only way out of the empty feeling, because under the empty feeling is a whole universe of real, personal feeling, buried in a vault, in my experience.
If you can find someone emotionally debugged enough to sit with you when you're in the middle of your stuff, bless your lucky stars.
If you can't, it can still be done. It just hurts like hell for a real long time. It takes faith in life to ride it out. Nobody can give you faith in life, but fortunately, the darkness itself is the stuff light is made of, when you stay with the feeling. Learning that is the key, but it's pretty hard to remember, at least for me!
All best wishes,
Megan
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