I want to disappear

In short, I’m experiencing the longest episode of depression in my life, starting around August 2025, intensifying from October to December and continuing to this day. In my internal dialogue, I still value every friend I’ve made on the internet, every mutual who’s laughed at a post, and all the otomos and grems who choose whimsy over cynicism. But behaviorally, I act as if I never want to talk to anyone ever again, and this has caused me a great deal of cognitive dissonance. I’ve done everything short of killing myself to become a ghost on the internet. This includes marking myself as invisible and never going online in Discord and Steam, privating all of my social media accounts, never tweeting, and never reaching out to anyone. When people do message me, I have to go through an insane mental ritual of planning out the contents of my response, passing the response through my mental filter, and imagining every way my message could be misinterpreted. This ritual repeats over and over again until I get a visceral feeling that I’m dying. If I respond to someone, I respond with a short message that doesn’t adequately contain the nuances of my thoughts or I’ll experience a demand threshold where I delay my response for hours or days. The weirdest thing about myself that I can’t forgive is that I don’t even have any obligations that would prevent me from responding to people in a timely manner. Every day I apply to four to five jobs and lay comatose in my bed (unless CC is streaming or there’s a new podcast episode).

I don’t know why I’m making this blog or this particular post. I know I’m not going to feel comforted by any responses & my behavior isn’t going to go away instantly. But at the very least, I want to declare where I’m at and that I do want to break out of it.