The Overgiver
Can we talk about the loneliness that comes from depression? It can seem so heavy. For someone who spent so much time alone, or adjacent to others who weren’t paying attention to me, I can’t pinpoint when my own company started to bother me. I can’t pinpoint when I started actively seeking human connection. I just know that when the urge hit, I changed.
At first, it was small and unnoticeable. By the time I realized it had taken control, my life had already spiraled into a mess. I never liked people. There were times I wanted people around, but I would get tired of their company and start pushing them away. I could shut down for days, weeks, even months. For people who don’t understand this personality trait—this binge-like need for space—a lot of them would be offended when I resurfaced.
I would be accused of abandonment, of missing periods of hardship and need, so it was hard to keep people close. It took a long time for me to realize the reason I shut down completely was because I was allowing people to drain me. I would give until I had nothing left. I guess shutting down was my body’s self-preservation mode. The problem was, once I resurfaced, people made my time to myself about them.
I was so good at overgiving that people missed my presence—not because they cared for me, but because they missed how I would outperform everyone else in their lives. I would anticipate everyone’s needs; I’d be exactly what they needed in any given situation, and if I didn’t have the answers, best believe I would find them. But when my life became stagnant and hard, no one poured back into me—not even a fraction of what I had poured out.
Actually, everyone I emptied myself to build up walked away and judged me the minute I wasn’t the fixture, but the one that needed fixing. It was in the darkest moments that I started to crave human connection, but all the people who benefited from my presence were nowhere to be found. Mind you, I’m not rich—thank God—so I wasn’t giving away houses. However, I traded a lot of my time, energy, and resources helping people when I couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t a problem, though—at least not until it was time to reciprocate.
It’s funny how quickly people count favors when they aren’t the ones receiving them, but now are expected to give. My world went from deafeningly full to completely empty in a matter of months. Goodbye dopamine, hello anxiety. Life hadn’t been silent for well over a decade. How does one readjust from being needed by so many to being completely rejected? To being betrayed by every single person you ever loved?
It was a painful lesson to learn that no one has to stay loyal after the benefits dry up. Actually, people are more likely to keep it moving to the newest source. I, the overgiver, had spent my building years sowing into the wrong people. I took too long to realize that my search for love made me a target for people who only loved as far as they could use me. In my desperation to fill the loneliness and cure years of depression—unmedicated and untreated, buried under overperformance—I had lost my boundaries.
I had clung to anyone who would cling to me, not realizing that while I thought I was cultivating my village, I was actually harboring leeches who benefited from me playing small in my own life to assist them in becoming the best versions of themselves. I took them as far as I could with the limited resources I did have. I gave them the best of me, but it was never enough. I left everyone better than I found them. I was the only one left behind—and it wasn’t until I hit rock bottom that I started to comprehend how much of a problem that was.