Seconding what $lave and RadBurn say. Depression can be a motherfucker; I can say this from personal experience. The right medication and therapy can help a lot, but finding the right medication and the right therapist can both be agonising trial-and-error experiences. What pulled me out of mine were in part those two factors, but also finding good friends in real life and something similar to this:
I had an a-ha moment where I realized my potential and knew what it would take to get there. This very much includes knowing sacrifice in terms of what desires and cravings I would have to let go of in order to grow. What caused that moment was having achieved enough successes where I owned the hard work involved.
In my case it was specifically coming to appreciate the strengths I’d developed as a writer and storyteller through literally decades of what I thought was just wasting time on forums. Turns out that I was honing a level of communication skill that few people with my specific cocktail of disorders (particularly autism-spectrum disorder, though I’d prefer if the “-spectrum disorder” were thrown into the wastebin of history… but I digress) ever attain. And I seem to have gained strengths in multiple creative media, which is a boon to the specific story I want to tell with
Chronicles, which I feel will be far more resonant in an interactive medium than it would as something witnessed on the screen or read on the page. In 2017 I also succeeded in writing the greater part of a book (70,000 words) in a fairly short period of time (roughly six weeks) without particularly planning one. (It’s been on hold for various personal reasons, but I plan to finish it off fairly soon.)
Depression is a horrible, destructive illness, and it’s seldom properly understood. It deludes you into thinking you’re seeing things clearly, and it deludes you into thinking there are no solutions. It’s easy to fall into a spiral of misanthropy when you’re depressed. It’s certainly true there are a lot of malicious people out there, but depression distorts your perception into thinking this comes out of human nature rather than being learned behaviour, and into thinking that it’s the majority of people who are poorly intentioned towards their fellow humans rather than a vocal minority.
It’s important to see things as they are, but that’s not what you’re doing when you’re depressed. You’re simply descending into fatalism. And it’s easy, from that standpoint, to descend into conspiratorial thinking as though the whole world is out to get you, or as though no one means well. That is absolutely not true.
The best thing you can do when you’re depressed, for both yourself and for others, is to spend time with some close friends who genuinely support you. Online people can help to some extent, but there are things you can’t get from online contact. There has to be in-person contact. I don’t necessarily mean physical contact (although that can certainly help), but just real-life company. And if you’re bad at making friends, there are various courses out there that can help with honing the sorts of skills necessary to do so. And of course there are plenty of groups out there for any shared interest you can imagine.
I spent far too much time time on the Internet for most of my twenties and early thirties. I don’t regret about 50% of this, because as I said, I wouldn’t have half the skill at communication if I didn’t. But there’s a thing as too much, and if you go into the wrong corners of the Internet, it’s entirely possible to go down a rabbit hole that you might not be able to come back from. The Internet is the greatest resource for information humanity has ever constructed, but it’s also the greatest resource for misinformation. There are some horrifying echo chambers of toxic views out there that can effectively brainwash people, and I suspect they’re particularly dangerous for people with depression or other mental disorders. Thankfully, not even close to a majority of people who go online find themselves subjected to these, but I feel that social media (and Facebook, reddit, and Twitter in particular) has been a minefield of them. Personal contact with others, particularly with others who may not share your personal background, can, in many cases, reduce the allure of these viewpoints.
In any case, this community seems to be largely free of them, and there are plenty of people here who genuinely want to help others, which I think is a large part of the reason I’ve devoted so much of my time to this community. The fact that so many projects like Eternal, Yuge, Tempus Irae, Rubicon, and Phoenix have emerged from the Marathon community is a testament to the fact that it is, above all, a community. Products like that rarely emerge from a single creator; they’re much stronger from people bouncing ideas off each other, being honest with each other about what works and what sucks and how to fix it. Even Phoenix, whose mapmaking is largely RyokoTK’s creation, still features artwork from numerous sources. And of course none of these projects would even exist without the Marathon engine and, in most cases, subsequent development of Aleph One, which is also a collaborative effort.
What I’m saying in far too many words is that no one ever benefits from isolating themselves, and you can’t remedy that problem by pushing people away. (If I write this many words then, contrary to what one might expect, it’s usually a sign that I’m actually in a hurry and don’t have time to express myself in fewer words. I type at upwards of 120 wpm, and my editing process usually consists 80% of eliminating extraneous verbiage.) The biggest problem is that depression is a fucking liar. It makes you think that you’re better off alone, that no one truly means well for others, that everyone dies alone and the human condition is one of endless misery. There’s plenty of suffering in the world, to be sure, but there are plenty of people who genuinely mean well, and in many cases, disasters bring out the best in human nature; you see all sorts of ad-hoc communities spring up to help assist those in need. What Mister Rogers said might be a bit simplistic for adults, but it’s still a good first step: “Look for the helpers.” The next step is, of course, to become one yourself.
It’s good that you’re trying to make amends and that you’re genuinely working on battling your depression. That shit ain’t easy. I’ve been there. So kudos for that.
I’d write more, but as I just alluded to, I’ve got shit to do. Good luck.