Existential Dread eating me up inside.

Ok so the title doesnt describe it the best but I wasnt quite sure what to name it 😅.

Im a M(29) and ive struggled with severe depression through most of my life and recently ive permitted myself to start taking anti depressants.

At first it was nice to no longer have constant depressive episodes or get stuck in my mind

But now without constantly battling for my mind im realizing I have a lot of demons that I buried under the weight of the constant survival race

The classics of course, ya know questioning my character and realizing im not the man I constantly told myself id be as a child

Then theres the whole new thing for me where I keep questioning if im worth loving since ya know every relationship ive been in ive been cheated on.

Or the BIG one I actively avoid thinking too deeply about by making jokes and laughing about it,......being that i suffered a nasty concussion years ago that left me unconscious for hours and wiped put my long term memories and rewrote the way my brain works

(So I used to be able to think about stuff and I could see it clearly in my mind, i would hyper obsess and as a result i had crazy anxieties)

But ...yay me after the hospital stay i noticed that after weeks, months, and now years nothing came back

I have maybe a handful of memories and I keep on having to pretend im not terrified and horrified whenever I think about the fact that whoever I was before is dead, I know I loved poetry and I would sing and write music

It was always dark and depressing but it had feeling

Now I cant feel anxious, not because I dont feel it, but because the moment I stop actively thinking about whatever made me anxious I forget...

I forget the dread about who I am now and who I was, I forget that im currently just a shadow of what was there before, I have moments where wires cross just right and I can feel myself coming back at times

Before I inevitably bury it anf bury it deep, because it seems some part of me is terrified to feel all that depression and anxiety that defined me again

So on that front im stuck in limbo, because I cant seem to build the momentum to break out of this cage that is my mind and body now broken.

So of course we come to the current source of agony

Right now im realizing I probably gave myself some kind of PTSD some years back because I had a real bad mushroom trip where my....identity kinda fell apart

I was starting to be convinced I was some strung out drug addict wandering the streets, and that my memories of this life are just my hallucinations

So later that day once I came down I forced myself to move on

Couldn't afford to let myself go into constant depression loops by questioning my experience

But now im starting to detach from reality real strongly, no hallucinations or anything like that

Best way to describe how it feels is like the characters from that Show Supernatural, ya know the people who lost their souls, one character talked about how he did the "right thing" not because he felt it was the right thing to do but because he remembers thats what he used to feel was right

Im noticing my sense of empathy and ability to connect to others and see them as real breathing living people is pretty much gone at times or at least it really slips away from me sometimes, I mostly just feel numb and like im staring into pictures around me

In those moments I have to pretend really hard that I know what the fuck im doing and that everything is alright, I remember loving my family and while i cant feel more than a feeling of comfiness(like a nice couch) at the best of times for them i keep pretending im not a broken mess because im aware enough that I cant afford to let myself fall apart, I cannot lose my sanity and unravel, there wont be anyone to put me back together and tell me ill be ok.

I keep having moments where things feel surreal and I start questioning if im still in that drugged out haze, if ill snap back to laying out on that bed staring at the wall

And that this is all a hallucination, its the moments when I think that when my heart starts pounding in my chest, and I feel a deep terror inside me

I rationalize and focus on music and visuals/videos/books and stimulation to help me return to a sense of calm, distracting myself helps me bury the issue for a bit

But its still there, inside me, scratching away in the back of my mind.

Im terrified that itll never go away, that I broke something sacred inside the human consciousness

Im noticing that I crave drugs more actively now as im taking the anti depressants

Where as before when I was depressed all the time, I treated them more like novelties, something I tried here and there for the fun of it but was usually apathetic about.

But id like to believe that its just a matter of my mind clinging to anything that might offer me a temporary escape from the creeping dread

I should probably go back to therapy, its been hard to admit to myself and more importantly force myself to do.