thoughts on depression

I do not feel like this every day but I do sometimes, at least a couple times per week and to a lesser degree more often, I got some good feedback on it on FB so am posting here for the next time I  feel this way and need to express it This is from last Thursday

getting back to apt was pure torture emotionally. brain gets too tired to control negative thoughts. the whole world falls apart in my brain. i walk so slowly each step weighted down with pure dread. i pace outside the building delaying going in, delaying doing anything. my brain simply does not want to be alive, and it puts off everything, trying to find a corner to hide in, but there is none. bursting to the seam with depressive thinking, crying, trying to find a meaning for suffering when there is none. the challenge of getting to east end apparently incited an adrenaline response that kept the negative thoughts away. walking to the west end is too damn EASY physically, yet time consuming, so my thoughts feel free to run loose and wreak havoc on my body and mind while i walk what sometimes feels like a death march, feelings of dread pouring out of my body, the source events and experiences that were years ago but whose effects and images continue to live and be felt in my body at every waking moment unless distracted. Crying while walking up Congress has happened more than once. I hate the feeling of yelling at myself to move, to walk, when the feelings of dread are so heavy that it feels like my body is made out of stone and I cannot move, I am paralyzed, trapped in place, trapped in my head, unable to reach out.... until someone happens by and engages me in a conversation, and I am myself again, connected , focused, until they leave, and I fall apart again. Seriously, can I exchange this brain for a new one? I think I got a faulty one. And I can't find the fix for it. The repair shop is closed and moved to China... there, somewhere, but not accessible.

Eleven hours out would probably be a lot for anybody... but it was what happened that wrecked me so much.... What I managed to be distracted by for some of today but then all the time I managed to be distracted by it came back to bite me in the ass like a bad rebound effect from an ADD medication... all the time I felt being okay came back to bite me in the ass and the fall was that much worse. How I can be so hard on myself for the way I am socially when I had as much positive social reinforcement as I did today is unexplainable, un-understandable, the result of a brain so stuck in past trauma that is totally not capable of moving on. The distress I felt over the reaction to certain chemical elements of the thing I tried earlier, the panic, it just wasn't fun. It just wasn't fun. I don't feel the need I guess to say more. Or have the words at the moment. Or want to go there emotionally. It was just fighting a war all day and I am tired of waging war against my body. I am tired of waging war against my body. I am tired of being stuck in a body that malfunctions so badly. I am tired of feeling like I am shut out from other people's lives. I try to tell myself, you can talk to people just fine, you just have a different way of doing it. I give myself example after example. Even tonight I ... got into conversations with two guys, both older men, since that seems to be the only type I can converse with, even after the open mic ended... and I got plenty of good feedback in the open mic... but still watching people converse with each other sends in me an endless loop of you're not doing it right, an endless loop of you're missing out. which, according to my new aspie friend from group, is true. I am missing out on 80% of communication due to not being able to read nonverbal communication. When I say I feel shut out, emotionally isolated, there is a very scientific, biological reason for this. It is because I literally AM shut out from their communication, or most of it. I try to compensate with words. I am the master of words. But words feel so empty. People my age don't communicate like I do. I can't make myself be okay with that. I can converse fine with older people. But that is problematic. I can't tell if people are just merely tolerating me and talking to me out of pity, or if they actually want to. I am thankful to talk to them about autism or analyze myself with a receptive audience but I want something more. What if the only thing I can have conversations with people about turns out to be autism and psychology related things? Most people get burned out on deep conversations. I can't think of anything light and airy to talk about. Music is the only other interest I have, but of course very specific music. I want to be casual and find a way to be with people that does not include analyzing my emotions, because most people don't want to do that. But yeah. I haven't found it yet.

I want to find a way to be at peace with my body and not scared to death of it. The dread I experience is the dread of feeling. The dread of physically feeling the way my body feels. It can't take it anymore, sometimes. It just feels too much. The tension in my body, the pressure in my head, the pressure of being alive. The physical, sensory, emotional pain that I feel in my body. It is too much sometimes. My body rebels against existing, but there is nowhere to go ,no way to escape an enemy that is literally your own body. And when I can't connect to music, when even music feels overwhelming, the one and only outlet I have.... the terror is too great. I need an outlet. The terror of feeling too disconnected to even connect to music. I can't go back there again. The fear of not feeling, almost. Or of feeling, but of only feeling the disconnect. Of only feeling the isolation. What was the 90s song.... "Yeah, I bleed just to know I'm alive..." Iris? I haven't heard that in ages. It's not knowing that I'm alive that I have trouble with ... It's knowing that I exist in other people's minds, knowing that there is anything in this world other than my mind, my awareness of myself, my awarneness of my pain. I have to fight so hard to find a feeling of being aware of other people or something other than me. That is a level of isolation that I just can't stand sometimes.

How do you know you exist in other people's minds? Is that some kind of theory of mind or object permenance developmental stage that most people achieve by age 6? Why am I stuck there? If other people with autism have trouble reading social cues, and are as emotionally shut out as I am, why are they not as desperate as I am? Are they, and I just don't know it? How will I live a life continuing to be shut out from others' emotions? It is just too painful to bear sometimes. It may not be that they are not emotional enough, I am finding, although often it is. It is that I cannot read their energy or their feelings, their cues, and connect to it. And it is my brain keeping me in a perpetual state of danger and isolation due to the feelings of both physical bad-ness and past emotional trauma.

I am tired of scanning the environment for threats and feeling outside, behind a glass, even when I am actually participating.