Does it ever end?

Depression, please cut to the chase
And make a long story short
Oh, please be done
How much longer can this drama afford to run?

(Lyrics quoted from memory, desperately hope they're right, but my memory is bad...)

This song (Owl City, Tidal Wave) caught my attention while I was on the way to work this morning. The worst thing about depression is that it is just really boring, you get bored of being stuck in your head with the same negative thoughts, you just want it to go away. I've been thinking a lot recently about how long it will take me to recover - or if I will ever recover completely. I honestly don't know right now.

The last couple of days were really good, I was feeling quite positive. Today, not so much. A couple of things shook me. Really weird things.

Firstly at work. The day was actually going really well, busier than expected with a couple of quite big sales. Then I sold a customer a dark blue swing when I think she might have actually wanted a pale blue swing and got totally freaked out. All I wanted to do was go and hide in the stock room, or at least beg my manager to give me a long reassuring pep talk. Neither of these things happened (still not sure if they even know about my depression and I don't want to bring it up unless absolutely necessary...). I calmed down eventually. But it was frustrating. Mostly I think my customer service is actually pretty good. I'm naturally very polite, I like making small talk with customers, helping people makes me happy. But it takes annoyingly litte to knock my confidence, and then I'm borderline useless for a while...

Second knock came this evening (by which point I was feeling fine again). I saw the results from some tests my brother had taken recently. He'd done fairly well on two papers, but pretty badly on the third, and therefore failed the entire subject. He can retake that one paper again, but I don't know how much difference it would make... That made me sad.

My relationship with my brother is complicated. He has Asperger's Syndrome. I could write for hours on the impact this has had on me and my family, but I'll leave that for another time, I'd like to get some sleep tonight. Right now, it is enough to say that my relationship with my brother is... complicated. Often it feels like we're just strangers who happen to live in the same house. I can't talk to him. I think I could when I was younger, but communication broke down somewhere (I suspect when I became a teenager...)

So we basically both live in our own worlds with very little interaction. I'm mostly used to it. But whenever he gets particularly good or particularly bad news - enough to penetrate my consciousness - I simply don't know how to process it. Exam results are especially complicated, as our academic standards are extremely different. Bad results in particular - I know he's not stupid, he just doesn't think how examiners want him to. I wish I could help, share my knowledge... But that just reminds me how big the distance between us is. The best I can do is explain to my parents what he should be doing, and they pass it on to him.

I think he's afraid of me. I'm not sure why. That makes me sad. And I wonder whether it will ever be possible to bridge the gap...

Is that depression talking or the realist in me? I find it hard to tell most of the time now.