"Well," the broker, all smiles, says, "You could invest in this company, NBT. The buzz is high, so the shares are already expensive, but they're pretty much guaranteed to grow in value. Investing $30,000 in that ought to do it."
"I don't have $30,000 to invest," you say, meekly.
Your broker's smile has disappeared. He looks positively furious. "Well, why the fuck are you wasting my time?" he demands, as he reaches over your desk to throttle the life out of you and steal your wallet.
*
This would never happen in real life. Not only because investment brokers aren't that evil (well, most of them), but also because even the shittest financial adviser would, you know, figure out how much money you actually have before telling you how to invest it.
And yet, this is a situation that undoubtedly seems very familiar to just about anybody with depression. Our limited resource isn't money (although more is always welcome), but energy. (I use the term 'energy' here because 'spoons' is a great term for talking with people who already know what you're talking about, but it's not so useful for communicating with the people who need to be told about this stuff.) And the people who come along to tell us how to invest our energy aren't people we're paying, but people who think they're helping.
Like a financial adviser who tells you to invest money without knowing how much you have, people who tell you how to invest your energy without knowing how much you have are wrong, wrong, wrong. But you can tell a financial adviser how much money you have. Telling people how much energy you have is difficult for a number of reasons: it's not easily quantifiable, it is often something you sense rather than consciously appraise, and, most importantly, it's very easy to feel guilty about admitting your energy is limited.
Doing the best you can with what you have isn't a shameful thing. Other people don't understand how difficult that is for people with depression to accept even unto themselves, much less to assert it.
When someone tells you to invest energy you don't have, it's difficult not to feel like you're being accused of holding back. Many people with depression have already been through - or are still going through - the internal struggle with accepting that they are depressed and not Just Lazy. Bringing that back up is called gaslighting, and it is a form of abuse. People who are trying to help probably don't realise they are abusing you, but that is no reason why you should accept it.
But whether you feel ashamed that you can't live up to other people's expectations, angry that other people expect the impossible of you, resentful that more functional use of your energy is denied to you by your illness, or - most likely - a mixture of all three, those feelings are energy leeches. That's not to say you shouldn't feel them - depression is, after all, fundamentally an illness of what you "shouldn't feel" - but you should acknowledge and be aware of what they cost you.
The crux, here - the thing that other people fail to understand - is that it's not just a question of whether or not you have enough energy to do what they suggest. Even the very act of deciding how to respond to their "helpful advice" is aggressively costly in terms of energy. It can feel like - and is - a lamentable waste of a resource you have in precious short supply.
Doing the best you can with what you have isn't a shameful thing. I'm going to repeat that. There is a contradiction in the depressive mind. You probably don't quite believe this statement yourself, but are enormously frustrated that this isn't shriekingly obvious to other people. Expressing this to other people is often more than you can manage, but hoping they take the hint is painful.
That's why I wrote this post. Partly just to express it for myself, but also in the hope that it is helpful for other people who are struggling to express it.
You are doing the best you can with what you have, but only you know what you have to work with.
