[From the Diaries]
I don’t usually talk about how bad it gets.
There’s too much shame around it. The kind of things people don’t really understand. When something doesn’t look normal, people immediately react with discomfort. Icky. Ew. What’s wrong with you?
But for me, it’s just, reality.
Some days I can’t even begin to explain how it feels inside my own mind. I think deep down I know when a low is coming. It’s like something in my gut senses it before the rest of me does. But the timing is never convenient, never when life pauses and says, okay, now you can fall apart. So I ignore it as much as I can.
And because I’m able to keep functioning through it, it gets labeled something neat and clinical: functional depression.
Functional. As if that word somehow makes it manageable.
Because from the outside it looks like I’m choosing when to let it take over. Like it happens on my terms. But the truth is, it only looks that way because I fight it until I can’t anymore.
I’ve been in bed for over twenty-four hours.
Yesterday I forced myself to go for a run because the ugly voices in my head were getting louder. I started feeling heavy in my body, fat in my mind, exhausted in a way sleep doesn’t fix. I thought maybe movement would quiet it. Maybe a workout would shake something loose.
Instead, it made everything worse.
I’m not paralyzed, but I feel mentally handicapped. Like my brain is wrapped in fog and every simple task requires a level of effort I don’t have.
And then there are the relationships around you. The weight of them.
Lucky for me, there’s really only one that matters right now. The one I have with my boyfriend.
But even that feels broken some days. Damaged in ways I don’t even know how to begin repairing.
But then there he was.
When I get into these states, when my mind refuses to cooperate with the world, I stop trying to analyze it. I used to ask why. I used to try to solve it. Now I just let it wash over me and wait for it to pass, hoping that eventually I’ll come back to myself. Hoping the energy returns. The will to exist normally again.
On a TikTok live. With a woman he knows exactly how I feel about.
There had been rumors about them before. The thought of them together already made my stomach turn. And a few weeks ago I had found out that he had texted her from one of his fake accounts. His explanation was that he heard her grandfather had passed away, so he thought of messaging her.
“Helloooo,” he wrote. At 06:04 in the morning.
Does that make sense?
I wanted it to. I really did. I wanted to believe the explanation because believing it would have been easier than accepting what it actually looked like.
But it didn’t make sense.
And my mental state, my inability to function sometimes, is not an excuse for someone to take advantage of that vulnerability.
The person I’m supposed to be with should understand me. Especially the flawed parts. Because they are part of me.
But that wasn’t even half of what I discovered.
At one point I realized he had saved his ex’s number under his sister’s name. Clever. Calculated. And another girl’s number saved under a friend’s name, just so I wouldn’t suspect anything.
The level of intention behind that kind of deception is its own kind of cruelty.
So when I saw the TikTok live, something inside me snapped.
How dare you?
But what shocked me the most was that he was more angry at me for reacting. As if my anger was the problem. As if he couldn’t understand how that would look, how disrespectful it was, especially when we were supposedly trying to rebuild trust.
You say you want to fix things. And then you go and do something like that.
I don’t even have the words for the exhaustion that follows something like this.
I was already mentally drained.
And now, somehow, I’m expected to carry this too.
She Was Sea 