Does that title count as clickbait? Well, I hope it’s more creative than most clickbait and I also hope it worked.
Mental health issues are extremely complicated and one of the most common beasts out there these days — thanks, no doubt, to our increasingly-more-oppressive Western lifestyles — is depression.
Depression is a nasty bedfellow. It robs you of your energy, robs you of your inspiration, and can get as bad as robbing you of your will to go on. It’s an avalanche of never-ending negative spirals that demands you to pull yourself out of it when you have absolutely no will or internal incentive to do so.
I talk a lot of smack about depression nowadays when I’m scoring really low on the scale (an improved score of about ~23/27 in 2017 to ~5/27 in 2025). I like to think I have depressive moments, but I am no longer depressed. It is not my default state of existence anymore.
But all of this shit I talk about depressed people is 100% aimed at myself more than anyone else. I’m speaking from my own experiences, and of course yours may not match. Nevertheless, I apologize if this piece comes across as rude or unkind or dismissive to depressed people. I’m not speaking from ignorance about depression, I’m speaking from personal experience after having crawled out the arse end of it. If this article is harsh, it’s because I’m trying to draw your attention to something I wish someone had made me aware of sooner.
What might that be?
It’s very possible that your depression has turned you into a self-centered asshole.
How’d I find out I was an asshole?
I was at a wedding with my partner some years ago and we were sitting at a table with some strangers. This was in the middle of my strongest depression and it’s worth saying that I really and truly dislike being at Finnish weddings by default, because I have a hard time focusing on what’s being said when all of the dialogue is in Finnish. It’s very exhausting and not a ton of fun to exist in a space that everyone but you understands with ease.
However, this was an unusually pleasant wedding because some nice people at the table with us were introducing themselves and making polite conversation — rare for here in Finland. I was telling them a bit about my journalism and fiction writing, and they were being really polite and friendly.
I can’t remember how long it was afterwards. Could even be counted in years. But, one day my partner mentioned in passing that I hadn’t asked those nice people anything about themselves. I talked about myself a whole bunch, but didn’t reciprocate the kindness.
I felt like quite the asshole.
Why does that happen?
When you’re depressed, a lot of the time it’s caused by negative thought spirals. You’ve been dealing with something/someone for too long, for example, and your ability to push through fades.
In my case, it was immigration. I moved to Finland to be an Au Pair more or less on a whim and decided to stay here with even less of a plan. I didn’t know anything about immigration or what it’s like to move from outside the EU to within, nothing. So I really was just going with the flow and doing what felt right.
People who have huge regrets in life often tend to have big depressions at some point. If you’re wondering if you should have made a certain move at some point, I can at least give you some consolation in that mindlessly following your whims does not immediately a rad and easy life make, even if long-term regrets are few.
At first, the struggle was in trying to get a residence permit. Then they changed the rules for residence permits in the year that mine was pending. Then they changed the rules for how to apply for your residence permit in the next year that it was pending. All the while, I couldn’t find any work that wouldn’t immediately reject me on principle of ‘job priority goes to EU citizens.’ Everything was a stressful struggle and it took at least 3-4 years before I had any semblance of stability. YEARS.
By the time I got my permit I was enrolled in university, but I was already years drifted from my creative passions and was only doing a degree to learn something and improve my chances of getting a job. It’s really hard to get a decent job in Finland without a degree, regardless of what field you’re in — a decade and a half ago, my partner couldn’t get a job in an IT company despite having a lot of experience, while a friend with no experience and an entirely unrelated Master’s degree got the same job.
The pressure around finding a job in an economically stagnant country while trying to make friends and scrape together enough money to survive, while pretty much everyone back home is constantly judging you for one reason or another, is staggering. I was endlessly given advice by people who had absolutely no idea what I was going through.
Eventually, the weight of it all, the lack of wins in my life, and the constant failure to live up to my own expectations of myself (and those of others along the way) broke me completely.
Okay, but why might you get self-centered when you’re depressed?
One of the key features of depression is endless rumination spirals. When your life feels so heavy and so undervalued and unsupported and unfairly judged and so on, you eventually start to feel like you’re not good enough and you’re not worthy of good things, and that no one’s ever liked you anyway. So you hyperfixate on yourself, your words, your every single action, and your entire life’s history, all under a deeply critical eye.
In the mind of the depressed, one friend being annoying or rude brings back every instance of anyone ever being annoying or rude, all at once. One tiny failure becomes every time you’ve ever failed at something in your life. Spiraling into the past is as easy as breathing.
You become so focused on figuring out your own stuff, that you get burnt out. You start focusing on politics because you want to make the world a better place, but that just makes you despair for the world. You get more depressed. You start to feel like the world is closing in on you and you’re falling into a hole and you’re so utterly sapped of energy that you can barely manage anything. You’re under constant self-scrutiny (and in many cases, external scrutiny too), so the world outside of you stops being worth your energy, because everything you have is going towards trying to survive.
This eventually ends up with you visiting one of your best friends to get some space, only to tell one of the people you love most in the world that you don’t care about their recent experiences, their present grief, or what’s been going on in their life. You spend all the time you need with them, and never once ask them a personal question or show interest in their life. [yes, this happened to me]
How could you care, after all? You’re barely surviving the horrible things going on in your own life. You don’t have space for the things anyone else cares about. They seem so… trivial and insignificant to what you’re going through.
Well, I hate to tell you, but just because you’re feeling low, doesn’t mean other people are immune to your selfishness.
Here’s where you get lodged in a catch-22…
When you are depressed, you often feel very inordinately bad about yourself, like no one cares about you. You feel like you aren’t worth dealing with and reaching out is a burden to others. You don’t want to trouble the people you care about with your shit.
A lot of the time, this is because your problems seem trivial on paper or in brief, and if you need to spell it out in sufficient detail for all of your friends, it becomes just another burden you have to deal with. You feel like you have to constantly justify your pain and sadness, and that too gets annoying and draining, even when people are reaching out to see how you are.
But by retreating into your own misery, you put all the work on others to prove that they care about you. You stop meeting people halfway. You stop putting in effort. You stop reaching out to say hello to people and connect. You make your friends worry about you in the background, while you say nothing and slowly fade away.
I have a few examples of relationships with depressed people from my own life that didn’t work out because of their self-fixations and isolation:
Before I moved to Finland, I had a BFF. He and I were very close, knew one another inside-out, would call each other out on our bullshit sort of close. And despite the fact that we lived in different provinces in Canada at the time, somehow it was me moving to Finland that was too much. He just stopped putting in any effort to be in touch with me. At one point, I found out that his manic depression had returned, he had serious health issues, had lost his job, might be homeless soon, and he was suicidal again. For 3+ years, I had no idea if the person who was supposed to be my bestie for life was even still alive at all. He robbed us both of our friendship, but eventually made a resurgence and we reconnected, just like old times. Until he just randomly vanished again. Finally, when my son died and stakes in other relationships were nonexistent, I told him that I deserved a BFF who matched my loyalty and cared about me as much as I cared about him. I told him he would always be my family and I would always be here for him if he needed me, but I was done chasing him. I never heard any response and I also haven’t heard from him since. That was 2 years ago by now.
My partner also had a very dear friend who simply vanished out of his life. After endless messages checking in on him, he finally responded ~2 years later with something that basically read, “You know how sometimes you just can’t deal with people for… a year?” Well, at the time, no, my partner had no idea what that was all about, even if he does now. All he wanted back then was for this friend to talk to him, connect, discuss his problems, maybe help find some solutions if he could. But that friend chose to self-isolate. We haven’t heard from him in probably a decade at this point. All we feel like we can do is hope the best for him from afar.
And then, there was the friend who channeled their depression into social justice, became so gung-ho that they started inverse oppressing good people — policing everyone’s words, jumping up the asses of well-intentioned folks who were just ignorant on a subject, and generally acting like a holier-than-thou ‘umm, actually’ Woke Avenger. They crossed a line with me a few years ago, and in the middle of our after-care conversation (you know, the ones that save friendships after a fight), they got burnt out on their social justice war and decided to take a break from social life for 2 years without saying a word. Stopped replying mid-conversation, leaving me to wonder for ages if it was something I said or if they just burnt out and needed a break. Both situations were equally possible. After a year or two, I had to ask their partner’s friend if she knew if this friend was still alive and if they were still together, because I had no idea. Eventually, they came back online for a day and I was so disgusted by the lack of any sort of self-awareness towards others relating to their disappearance that I decided that I cannot call that person a friend anymore.
All of these people were important. And all of them have gained the title of Asshole in these situations, not because they’re bad people per se, but because they’ve become so selfishly involved in their own mental state that they’ve forgotten how to be friends with other people. Maybe they’ve even forgotten how to reciprocate love.
Either way, at some point, you have to protect yourself and when people choose to self-isolate, you can’t force them to come out.
This is how depressed people get themselves abandoned. Your friends cannot wait around for you forever. Eventually, caring about you in your silence becomes too much, and your friends will need to move on with their lives. If you want to see that in action, go watch the questionable rom-com, PS - I Love You.
This happens even when you’re not self-isolating…
Even when you do go out and see friends, your depression can still turn you into kind of a dick.
Unlike being a selfish wang, this presents more like a group of people hanging out doing group therapy where one person is the center of all focus and attention. Their problems are the only ones worth addressing. They never ask anyone else about what they’re going through, or try to relate to likeminded, caring friends.
I faced this situation on Discord not long ago. I made a friend who was young and pretty obviously likely undiagnosed AuDHD, who had really toxic ideas about romance. She dated a mutual acquaintance’s bandmate but asked me and my friend not to tell his bandmates who she was talking about, while she slandered this guy for months per how he treated her. Yet she kept going back to him, after all of us — including the guy’s unwitting bandmates — told her it was a bad idea and he was treating her badly. More recently, I decided I had to stop following her because she again ignored everyone’s advice re: her second relationship. After it ended badly, she posted the most painfully cringey collection of pictures of her and her ex, more or less begging him to take her back. Guys, I tried to be a positive influence, tried to be supportive, but this girl never once reciprocated, said “thank you” (even after I let her stay with me for 2 weeks one summer), and never gave any support to me or anyone else. It was all about her and her depression and her life woes and no one else mattered unless it was a boy giving her attention. Look, I don’t mind watching a trashfire for amusement, but at some point, you’ve gotta kick the bin away so that it doesn’t burn down your own home.
Being a twat to your friends has a lot of faces. It can be ghosting a friend for years because you’re too tired to talk to them or explain yourself. It can be lashing out because you’re at the end of your rope and burnt out to hell. It can mean making all conversations about you, your thoughts, your issues. It can lead you to forget that you aren’t the center of the universe and your problems aren’t as unique as you might think, and that other people have their own struggles and pains that they’re dealing with.
And it’s okay that you feel this way. That’s depression in a nutshell. But I’m just saying, just because your feelings and actions are valid, that doesn’t mean you’re not still an asshole.
It’s no wonder that it might lead to losing friends slowly and surely, because you stop caring about them, and it shows. You’re so invested in your own misery that no one else’s problems matter. And all healthy relationships are a two-way street.
The lamest thing you can possibly do is take this as proof that all of the negative things about yourself are true. If that’s the case, being emo about it doesn’t help. If you want to stop being seen as a bad person, stop doing things that make you a bad person. People who love you aren’t abandoning you because you can’t find work, or whatever other self-deprecating reason you’ve come up with to hate yourself. They’re abandoning you because you don’t give a fuck about them while they dedicate so much energy to being concerned about you, and you probably didn’t even notice or appreciate their love, you asshole.
So what’s the solution?
I’ll talk about my depression journey and how I beat it in another article sometime. I don’t want to make this too long.
But the funny thing about depression is that there’s not a lot of clear advice on how to get past it…
Except there is. There are lots of different things you can try (medicine, alternative medicine, therapy, counseling, fresh air, exercise, generally having new experiences) that are very helpful, but one of the lesser known yet most proven ways to improve your depressive symptoms is to get the fuck out of your head.
Here’s one of many studies that corroborates this idea, if you want that sweet, sweet scientific proof to back me up.
That can mean going outside and going for a walk, yes, but what it means more practically is to simply devote yourself to something you care about external from yourself. Get into politics, get into art, get into volunteering, get into teaching, whatever. Pick something you find interesting in some way, and explore it. Staying locked in your negative headspace doesn’t do you or anyone else any favors, and staying in your negative rumination spirals doesn’t give you any new, fresh, or valuable insight. You’re essentially trapped in an echo-chamber of self-loathing or world-loathing or whatever. Staying in there, by yourself, does not invoke change for the better.
So, my friends, please do your best to find the necessary self-awareness within yourself to not become this person…
Why? Because if nothing else, finding out that your depression is turning you into an asshole is a good way to get more depressed and hate yourself more. It’s actually an easy way to prove to yourself that you are, in fact, worthless.
But that’s not productive, hating yourself doesn’t make you suck less, and we’re back at square one of you isolating yourself so your stupid shit doesn’t hurt any more people. This doesn’t counteract anything though. It doesn’t fix the problems in your depression or your social life.
If I’m being honest, one of the nicest ways to get out of your head is to spend some time with someone else. Get a change of scenery. Get a change of perspective. Disrupt the narrative of negativity, save up every scrap of energy you have, and do something that makes you happy with it.
If you do that long enough, you might find yourself in a place like me: reconciling with your asshole moments and trying to heal so you can actually be a likeable, reciprocal part of your community.
Stay balanced, my friends ❤️🐻
Note from the author: Thanks for reading!
If you’re curious about how my life lessons impact my fantasy writing, consider checking out The Vitmar Chronicles — a slice-of-life coming-of-age series that follows two brothers as they navigate life’s ups and downs. For example, this series focuses far more heavily on emotional outcomes from experiences than it does on cool action (though there’s sometimes cool action too).
You can: read the free sample here ~ Learn more about the series here ~ Find it on Amazon (EU link, but you can find it in all countries), Google, Kobo, and the Draft2Digital Network! Alternatively, read for free as a paid subscriber here on Substack! Volume II is out now!
I love your writing—I read the one about Anne Shirley, but this one really got to me because I’m living with this asshole. He’s everything you mentioned, and I’ve tried everything to get his head out of his ass. He’s my brother, so it’s not exactly easy to abandon him, no matter how much I want to sometimes. I know eventually things will change. I just hope it’s sooner rather than later.
I am willing to sell you "Even MORE of an . . . " for twelve cents.