At least for me, your messages reads "I am depressed...I am depressed...I am despressed...Oh, but I'm not depressed...I am depressed..." etc. What do you imagine depression to be? Everything you're describing is depression. I suspect when you say "I'm not depressed" you mean you aren't sad, or you experience happiness regularly, or something. Which basically means you only have 90% of the possible symptoms of moderate depression, not 100%. Given that hardly anyone has 100% of the symptoms (well, maybe unless they're severely depressed), that doesn't exactly make you special.
But depression is just a label, it's not like accepting that label means there is a single known fix for it. Accepting it might at least remove your current obstacle to exploring certain options.
Talk to a doctor. Talk to a therapist. You might be one of the many people for whom a chemical treatment will help, or you might be one of the many people for whom something like cognitive behavioral therapy will help. There is unlikely to be a magic bullet, but there are many things to try. If you're able to detect an incremental change, you can focus in on that path. Right now you may be dulled out enough that you don't have the energy to detect what's working or do anything with it, so you should start with some professional help to lift you up enough that you can start doing the work to make forward progress.
Yes, I have been in a similar situation. I can't say I've "escaped". I think that was my expectation for a long time, that either you're stuck in the mud or you come up with a way to escape, but it's one of those things where lowering my expectations was necessary to making progress, and in retrospect I've made more progress that I would have initially thought possible. But I don't feel like I've escaped. It's still there, and it still drags me down periodically, but it's been a while now since my last long period of really wallowing in it.
Family can help. Friends can help. Work can help. Entertainment can help. But all of them can be a crutch, too, and just be a means to extend the status quo. You'll need to put work into each and every one of them specifically to make sure they're actually taking you in the right direction. It's a constant vigilance sort of thing, which might sound awful but at some point you'll look back and see that it's more than worth it.
But depression is just a label, it's not like accepting that label means there is a single known fix for it. Accepting it might at least remove your current obstacle to exploring certain options.
Talk to a doctor. Talk to a therapist. You might be one of the many people for whom a chemical treatment will help, or you might be one of the many people for whom something like cognitive behavioral therapy will help. There is unlikely to be a magic bullet, but there are many things to try. If you're able to detect an incremental change, you can focus in on that path. Right now you may be dulled out enough that you don't have the energy to detect what's working or do anything with it, so you should start with some professional help to lift you up enough that you can start doing the work to make forward progress.
Yes, I have been in a similar situation. I can't say I've "escaped". I think that was my expectation for a long time, that either you're stuck in the mud or you come up with a way to escape, but it's one of those things where lowering my expectations was necessary to making progress, and in retrospect I've made more progress that I would have initially thought possible. But I don't feel like I've escaped. It's still there, and it still drags me down periodically, but it's been a while now since my last long period of really wallowing in it.
Family can help. Friends can help. Work can help. Entertainment can help. But all of them can be a crutch, too, and just be a means to extend the status quo. You'll need to put work into each and every one of them specifically to make sure they're actually taking you in the right direction. It's a constant vigilance sort of thing, which might sound awful but at some point you'll look back and see that it's more than worth it.