You can't focus. Nothing seems to fit right. You're never satisfied with yourself. You look at others and you think, what am I doing wrong? Even if you had a great day, where you tried something new or challenged yourself, the day's end is tinged with a strange, timid hue of hopelessness.
I don't think I'm depressed. To me, depression means being unable to feel joy from things which normally bring it. I still feel incredible joy and I'm still highly optimistic. It's more of a broad, existential unease. No, I don't feel unhappy; I feel lost.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this feeling lostness (with perhaps a tinge of ennui) aligns nicely with perhaps the most turbulent time of my life thus far. After over twenty years of schooling, I no longer have a premade track to follow. I'm trying to create a new life basically from scratch, with conditions, requirements, and desires totally unique to me.
Not only that, but even the few things that carried over from my school years have been broken. My parents are getting separated. My girlfriend of nearly four years broke up with me. Many of my friends are moving away. Even now, as I write this, I am still in the midst of accepting, processing, and integrating these changes.
Having said that, the fact that I am blessed to have a well paying job is a marvelous source of stability. I also have a multitude of hobbies to keep me occupied as well. But even with these hobbies and my job, I haven't yet found my footing to the point where I'm totally comfortable. I still feel like I'm mostly finding my way as I go along, though from many people I've talked to, some far older, they feel just the same.
I'm beginning to think that feeling of unease comes not from a lack of self confidence (which definitely took a hit last year) but from a disillusionment with self improvement. Unlike your younger years, where roars of encouragement seem to be impossible to avoid, self improvement after college is almost entirely a personal experience. You can share your creations and your insights with others, but no one truly understands what you are doing.
I wish I could scream out over the hills and orate about how a book I read deeply affected me or about how proud I am of a certain song I wrote, but the truth is that these exclamations are almost always kept to one's self. It just takes too much time to understand any one person and people are, expectedly, busy.
It isn't like the movies
In our increasingly fantastic and advancing world, more and more of how we perceive ourselves becomes tinged by the influences of the ever-growing media machine. For our parents, this mostly came from books, movies, and TV shows, and the effect was subdued; for the most part, most people spent almost all their time in the "real world," and learned societal conventions from real people at school or at work.
Nowadays, we are always watching short videos, reading online blogs, or just surfing the web. To add to this, the media we consume is getting farther and farther away from reality. Photoshop came first, and now we almost expect people's looks to be perfected in video form. Reality, of course, is far uglier and mundane, so comparison inevitably creates an uncomfortable feeling of "wrongness."
Everyday, on talk shows, on movies, on YouTube videos, we see people with hyper interesting lives looking extremely beautiful with lots of money and attention doing incredibly fun things. Or we see people who seem to be in touch with themselves to a envy-inducing level and are able to articulate themselves flawlessly. Or we see people who create with a drive we wish we had, who execute with visions with an aim that is true.
Somewhere deep inside of us, we know these to be at least a little fabricated. After all, they had to take the time to write out the script, record themselves, perhaps plan their outfits, etc. And yet still I find myself seeing these fabricated scenes of unreality and applying them to my life as if I could live them.
Accepting that real life isn't a movie, it isn't perfect, and is often boring, is a steep hill we encounter as we exit school and enter the "real world." Life is full of incredible adventures, that is for certain, but it often isn't. Often, life just is. Not bad, not good, just existence. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
The reason some people might find issue with the idea that life can just "be," is because of unrealistic expectations set up by the aforementioned media machine. All of its many arms contribute to this: porn creates unrealistic expectations for sex; the news may create a feeling of constant decline; blogs and articles may create false expectations of how interesting one's life ought to be; and books may make us romanticize our lives in a literary, highly unrealistic way.
These days, we seem to face a crisis of stability, an age of addictions. At every turn, we are faced with hyperbolic binaries which demand absolute fealty. Both in politics and outside, it is harder to live without these days than with. To live without, e.g. our phones, requires us to put forth a determined, ultimately futile effort. These things are designed to draw us in like this. It isn't a consequence, its the point. Unfortunately, it was easier to avoid these attacks on our own self worth and attention in the past; this is a distinctly modern battle.
The only way I can think to combat this and to live satisfied and stably in your own life, is to just keep on keeping on and disregard that which doesn't suit you. Embrace struggle and try to find a place to stand. It isn't easy, but its possible. I almost think its a feature of your 20s. We're all figuring it out as we go, but at some point, I think we'll look back and smile at how far we've come.