Anhedonia might be the worst word I’ve had to learn in the last two years. It’s textbook definition is an inability to feel pleasure, though I think it’s more apt to call it joylessness.
Read any forum or group on depression and you’ll see typical patterns. People who express that they no longer feel much of anything. I viewed it as being emotionally flatlined. It wasn’t that I was happy or sad specifically I simply couldn’t feel much of anything positive. You can have so many things in your life, a good job, a wife and family and yet depression and anhedonia can still turn all of that into a joyless series of day to day tasks.
Painful as it sounds, being aware of depression and your own sense of joylessness doesn’t automatically make it go away. Often I worry that the things I do throughout the day are essentially just me going through the motions. Smiling when I need to because that’s what people expect. I do have a few moments of what feel like happiness but it’s been a juggling act.
I know that motion or not, I have to put the effort in to at least try to feel something other than the flat emotionless state that has become too common for me. It isn’t easy and there are certainly days I just feel like giving up. Amid all that though I try to find at least one good thing that happened per day and remind myself that I can still feel things, it just takes a bit more of an active role for me now.
