Distraction and Despair
one of the nastiest bits about depression is how distracting it is. it's constantly taking up space in your mind, like a mental Bitcoin miner wasting your RAM on unimportant bullshit. I don't need to think about how pathetic and worthless I am, I need to focus on figuring out how Rust generic types work, so if you would please stop bothering me with that nonsense.
there's been so much stuff that I'd like to do, but I just don't have the energy or creative juice for, because, again, mental Bitcoin miner. I haven't worked on my comic in weeks! there's books I want to read, things I want to do, people I want to talk to, but I have to spend all of my time arguing with this little fucking gremlin in my head that just makes up whatever dumb bullshit he thinks will win the argument.
it's a bit like what Sartre said about antisemites:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
the point of the malformed superegoic voice of self-criticism that characterizes depression is not to make reasonable arguments, it's to grab whatever argument makes you feel the most miserable at any given time and beat you over the head with it. you can't productively argue with it, because you're just validating it. the only way to disrupt it is by undermining it entirely.