Why is it that I can switch from feeling so bad to comfortably numb so quickly?

Its like I can be feeling so bad and getting so many memories back to everything is "fine". I almost become a different person and feel stupid for having felt so bad. I feel like I invalidate my own feelings. I feel like I almost made up all the bad feelings but when they come back suddenly I realize Im not exactly making them up. I dont know what to trust when this happens all the time. It also makes it hard to know which part of me is real.
Answer:
I have bipolar disorder. I used to feel what you describe when my depressions started as a teenager. I would feel low for a day or two. Then the next day I would wake up and feel fine, wondering what had just happened to me. It's not quite like someone turned a switch and I was depressed, then turned it back and I was normal, but almost. And I reacted exactly as you describe. It was this strangeness of it that first made me see a doctor. She ordered a thyroid test, which was normal. It was a few more years before a psychologist told me this is what depression can feel like. The periods of bad feelings had gotten somewhat worse by then, with my contemplating suicide at least once.

A major depression isn't diagnosed until those times of feeling bad last at least 2 weeks, but there are lesser diagnoses like cyclothymia if one's moods are always shorter than that. Medications can help. Don't believe anyone who says they don't.

You may have other reasons than mine for what you describe. Maybe you get out of your head and into your surroundings and that cheers you up without the bad feelings being the genetic/neurochemical disorder that it is in me. The thing is that the content of my moods never has been fake, even if my moods are exagerrated by being bipolar. My moods are about romance, about successes or failures in other things, about how exciting or disgusting other people are, anything anyone feels moody about. I just feel it more intensely. So it's all real. It's all part of you. It's just the spotlight operator might overdo it in some of us.

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See a doctor and don't beleive anything you read on hear.

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i have this too. Life is weird and ridiculous. I don't believe in anything.

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I experience this same problem. I can be so sad and then a few hours later I will be just fine. It makes it hard for me to deal with life because sometimes I am ok and sometimes I am really down. It might be good to ask your doctor about a mood stabilizer in addition to antidepresant.

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