I'm not lacking willpower. I still have ideas, ambitions, things I would like to accomplish. Yet today, between what I want to do and what I am actually able to do, there is a gap that seems to grow wider every year.
The steps involved overwhelm me. I anticipate difficulties, complications, other people's reactions. Often, everything turns negative in my head before I've even started anything.
And it exhausts me.
What bothers me most is that I know how to make things move forward. I have experience, skills, convictions. I am still capable of thinking, imagining projects, finding solutions.
But I can no longer find that drive that allows me to take action.
I no longer really recognize myself in this way of functioning. And the more time passes, the more I feel like I am losing something that was part of my identity for a long time.
Ten years searching for answers
For more than ten years, I have been receiving care for my mental health. I receive treatment and am currently taking part in dialectical behaviour therapy at the CLSC.
Yet even today, I am trying to understand what is really happening to me.
I do not question the help I am receiving. I understand that the goal is first to treat what is most urgent. In my case, that is mainly depression and anxiety. But I feel that an important part of what I am experiencing remains unexplained.
My difficulties are not limited to depression. I have an enormous amount of trouble interacting with others, being in public places, and managing certain otherwise ordinary situations. I feel few emotions, or at least, I have difficulty recognizing and understanding them. I also wonder about my own ability to feel empathy.
I don't know whether all these difficulties are connected. Nor do I claim to know where they come from. But after all these years, I would like more attention to be paid to my history, my background, and the way I function as a whole.
I don't just want help getting through another difficult period. I want to understand why certain situations require so much effort from me and why, despite years of care, I still feel like I am sinking deeper.
And yes, I also want to receive a precise diagnosis, insofar as an assessment can establish one.
Not to define myself through an illness or disorder, but because a diagnosis can give clinical meaning to years of seeking help, guide treatment and, in some cases, make it easier to access specialized resources.
I don't expect a diagnosis to solve all my problems overnight. But I hope it can help me better understand the ins and outs of what I am going through, identify approaches that work for me, and regain some quality of life.
After all these years, I am no longer simply seeking to be functional enough to get through my days.
I want to be able to live my life, not just learn to endure it.
When everyday life becomes an ordeal
What seems most difficult to make people understand is how much my mental health affects things that others consider trivial.
Answering a phone call, making one, or simply exchanging a few pleasantries with the clerk at the convenience store are now situations that require effort from me.
All it takes is for my phone to ring while someone is near me for me to feel suffocated. Anxiety takes over, and I end up declining the call.
Yet before, I could make and take calls without any particular difficulty. I sometimes felt slightly uncomfortable when someone could hear my conversation, but nothing that kept me from answering.
Today, I don't understand how I got here. And that lack of understanding is sometimes accompanied by a real disgust with myself.
The worst part is that the difficulty does not disappear when the phone stops ringing.
Even if the person leaves me a voicemail, there is a good chance I will not call them back. I am uncomfortable with my own reaction and apprehensive about theirs.
Because deep down, I know full well that I would not like it if someone did the same thing to me.
So I end up avoiding someone I had no intention of ignoring.
But not all my social difficulties appeared over the years.
“Hello,” “good morning,” “enjoy your meal,” “thank you,” and all those expressions we use every day have never felt natural to me. I use them because I know they are expected, not because I spontaneously feel the need to.
If I go to the checkout at a store, it is to pay for my purchases. I am not looking to talk about the weather, the news, or anything else. I understand that these exchanges are part of social habits, but I do not always understand why they are necessary.
And this disconnect is nothing new.
Even when I was young, I watched others and tried to reproduce their behaviour as best I could. I knew there were ways of speaking, reacting, and behaving that were expected, even if they did not come naturally to me.
So I did it.
Not because I felt the need to, but simply because it was what was expected of me. A way of hiding my differences and behaving like everyone else.
Even today, I know these rules and I am able to apply them. But they have not become any more natural for all that.
And with the anxiety that now accompanies my social interactions, these efforts sometimes become so uncomfortable that I prefer to limit my exchanges to the bare minimum.
So there are things I have always found difficult and others that have become difficult over time. What I do not understand is why certain difficulties have taken up so much space in my life, to the point of preventing me from doing things that used to cause me virtually no problem.
And perhaps that contrast is the hardest thing to accept.
What I am losing of myself
My personal life and my professional life have always been two very different worlds.
As introverted as I am in my personal life, I was just as involved, available, and committed in my work. Professionally, what drove me was performance, responsibility, and achieving results.
And for a long time, I was truly in my element.
I could work three split shifts in one day to be present during key moments in traffic maintenance operations on major construction sites.
When I was self-employed, my phone rang at all hours of the day and night. And I had no problem with that.
I juggled operational planning, project management, lane-closure requests, about fifty emails, two hundred text messages, and around thirty calls in a single day.
And I loved it.
I knew my field, I knew what I was doing, and I was capable of making decisions, handling the unexpected, and finding solutions. To some colleagues, I was even a kind of pillar. Someone they could count on.
I was not working simply to complete tasks. I deeply loved what I did. I felt competent, useful, and in my place.
Today, the contrast is hard to accept.
I, who could handle so many responsibilities and demands, can now find myself unable to answer a single phone call.
Yet I still sometimes find that intensity again when a project truly excites me.
I have an entrepreneurial streak. When an idea lights me up, I can devote myself to it completely. I want to move forward, improve, perfect. One idea leads to another and my brain seems incapable of switching OFF.
I call it robot mode.
I can become so absorbed in what I am doing that I forget to eat, drink, use the bathroom, shower, or even sleep. The project takes up all the space, until my body and mind are completely exhausted.
And when something interrupts that momentum, I take it badly.
I am able to stop, respond to a request, or take care of something else. But inside, I feel irritation, frustration, and exasperation. I want to keep moving forward, and anything that interrupts that progress becomes hard to accept.
That is notably what I experienced with InspeKT, a tool I helped design to make it easier to report and track issues on the road network.
I threw myself into that project completely. I devoted an enormous amount of time to it and, above all, I enjoyed developing it. I was finding again that desire to build something, to think about solutions, and to push my ideas further and further.
I believed in it enough to overcome some of my apprehension and propose a pilot project to several dozen municipalities.
But no positive response came.
And then, everything fell apart.
What could have remained a professional disappointment took on a much greater place in my mind. I felt useless. My spirits plummeted, and I fell back into a particularly dark period.
That is also what unsettles me about the way I function now.
I can still be passionate, have ideas, invest myself without counting the cost, and deeply believe in what I am building. But when disappointment comes, I have enormous difficulty taking it.
And after repeatedly noticing these changes, I end up no longer believing in myself.
Social anxiety, generalized anxiety, rumination, my spirits no longer keeping up... All of it takes up considerable space in my life. Even when I consider returning to work or starting a project, I find myself doubting my abilities before I have even begun.
I know what I have been capable of in the past. I also know that some of those abilities are still there.
But I no longer know how to move forward without feeling that everything could collapse at the slightest disappointment.
I am still searching
I am not telling all this so people will pity me, nor so they will excuse my behaviour or my difficulties.
I am telling it because, for years, I have been fighting to understand what is inside me and to get the help I need to live more normally.
I see professionals, I take part in the treatments offered to me, I try to understand how I function and find ways to live better with my difficulties.
But I am tired.
Tired of questioning myself, of seeing what I can no longer do, of watching the years go by without feeling that I truly understand why I am where I am.
I am not looking for a ready-made answer. I know that a diagnosis will not change my life overnight and that no therapy will erase all my difficulties.
But I would like to know what I am really dealing with. To understand what has always been part of me, what has worsened over the years, and what I can still improve.
I would like to regain some autonomy, have confidence in my abilities, and no longer feel that every step can become a mountain.
I don't know if I will ever find the man I used to be again. Maybe he will not be exactly the same.
But I know one thing: despite the disappointments, the difficult periods, and all the times I felt I was no longer moving forward, I am still here, looking for answers.
I do not always have the strength to keep going at the pace I would like.
But I have not given up.
And I do not want to give up.
But I am worn out.