One of the biggest rules of camming is to not be on your phone, even if the room is dead. It makes you look uninterested, and therefore, uninteresting. In a typical camming situation, I would steer clear of my phone unless I was changing the music or holding it up to my camera because someone tipped to spin my "sexy funtime wheel." But hey, what's life good at if not completely fucking you over two weeks after you think you have everything figured out?
My depression is back, rearing its ugly head and draining all my motivation and passion from everything I do. Including Steemit, if my severe lack of posting lately after making a promise to post every day didn't make that obvious. depression is kind of tricky that way: the hardest things to do are the things that help overcome it. It's like the world's best super villain! Journaling is one of the biggest things someone can do to cope with depression; Steemit almost was and is like a journal to me, and despite how much I knew it would've helped me the past few days to write, I just absolutely couldn't do it. I'm not sure what drove me to write something up now. Maybe it's because I'm tired of staring at a half-finished drawing without being able to think of anything to add to it. Maybe it's an instance of somewhat-helpful procrastination; you know, like when you don't wanna make a phone call so bad that you deep clean your entire house. Either way, I can already tell that this is helping.
I've struggled with depression for about three years, since I started a program in high school that allowed me to start taking college courses throughout my Junior and Senior years. It wasn't until halfway through the first semester of my last year (the year after I graduated high school, aka late 2016) that my counselor and I came to the conclusion that I was probably struggling with ADD as well. We agreed that they were connected, but couldn't decide if the depression stemmed from the ADD or vice versa. Either way, It took another few months to get tested and prescribed Adderall, which did help. I didn't end up graduating, though; I had dropped and failed too many courses that year to make it up in one more semester. The biggest thing that helped my depression was being done with school. Or at least, that was my hope.
A huge part of my ADD is that I lack internal structure. I desperately rely on having to be somewhere at the same time every day. Once I was out of school and didn't have to go to class every day, I felt helpless. It was like my ADD pushed me and my depression was set up behind me to make me fall (like those dumb old cartoon skits; I should probably bail on this joke). I had a part time job, but the inconsistent schedule never helped me get back on my feet. After a month of wallowing, I ended up leaving home for the summer job with my mom (which I'm fairly certain I've written about previously).
That job was a rollercoaster for my mood. I woke up at 6 every day, but the first few weeks were rough. I had never worked that much, I never knew how long I'd be working every day, and it was such a giant pain in the ass to get my Adderall prescription sent so far away. Once things started to pick up, I was put on a 7-7 schedule, and my prescription was easier to get after a few weeks, too. Of course, it was still a high-pressure situation and I struggled every day, but I wasn't snapping at every single person and crying every hour anymore. I did end up leaving early, but I left to an amazing situation.
The first few weeks after moving away from my job, away from home, and across the country were better that I ever could have imagined. My rent was $100 a month, I had $3,000 saved up, I was rooming with my best friend who got me eating healthy and exercising every morning at 7:00. Then, maybe about a week ago, everything started back up again. Subtly, though. I lost the motivation to post here, which I attributed to not having enough time in the day. That's always been one of my biggest issues with identifying depression: there's always another reason these things could be happening. I started to get irritable and lethargic, which I thought was due to lack of sleep. So I started sleeping more; except I actually started sleeping more because I was depressed. I stopped exercising every morning because my friend had a different daily schedule than I did. I had also all of a sudden gotten my period for the first time in months (I don't get a regular period because of my IUD), which I attributed the majority of my issues to (I first started struggling with depression when my PMS never seemed to end, and birth control pills only made it worse).
I took my first night off camming ever a couple days ago, after spending all day shopping for new bras (I just finally learned my correct bra size!!). I had bled through my pantyliner and I was hormonal and the furthest from sexy I had ever felt. I felt bad when I thought about taking two nights off in a row, so I was back on Stripchat last night. I tried advertising the show as a "GFE" show, or girlfriend experience. It's a less sexy, non-nude show that's more about getting to know the model and feeling like you're spending quality time with them. I figured that would be perfect for a show; that way I could cam without doing anything super sexual while everything was going on down there. Unfortunately, it's not as popular or lucrative as the articles I had read said it would be. The only people that came to my room were regulars who tried to cheer me up and help me come up with ideas on how to sexy-up my shows. I know they were trying to help me by telling me other models I could watch to get ideas, but my brain instead was hearing that I wasn't as good as the other girls so why even bother? Their help only made things worse, which is another huge issue that my depression creates.
During this cam, I had been texting my mom. I told her I felt PMS-y depressed, and her immediate response was, "Get back on your antidepressant, sign up for Medicaid, and see a doctor ASAP. You have a strong genetic predisposition for depression and made a major move (one of 3 major life changes that will trigger depression). Get yo shit taken care of." This was the kind of help I needed. No flowery words of "oh it'll get better! Just do this and this!" Things like that just make everything worse because I'm physically unable to do them. My mom has been struggling with her depression for the majority of her life, and I'm so grateful that she was able to see that I was probably straight up depressed again and not just period sad (I didn't know moving was a trigger, but it makes sense and explained pretty much everything).
I don't really know if I had a point, or an ending to this. I'm supposed to start my show in ten minutes, but I don't have anything at all prepared. I'm scared that if I go on again I'll just sit there and be told by everyone what I could be doing better. And that it'll get better or pass or whatever. Thinking about it makes me want to cry out of frustration. At the very least, this is my reason for not posting here for awhile. Not too much in the aspect of camming, but I think I actually just needed to vent all of this a little bit. I'm not going to put cute photos in this, or make it more appealing. I know this isn't a very appealing article. Nobody wants to read about other people's problems. But hey, it's a day in the life of this modern camgirl. And hopefully, if anyone else is struggling, they'll read this and feel some sort of connection. I can't say solace, because the current moral of the story is that for some people depression never really goes away, but a connection or relation at least.
Apologies if anyone had been invested in my posts, I truly didn't mean to stop posting altogether. I won't say I'll post every day again, but I will do what I can.