I’m depressed.
That’s a big word to just throw around unknowingly, but I am. I’ve been clinically diagnosed as depressed and have been on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pills for over a year. Just over a year ago I made a plan to kill myself, but I had already lost a cousin to suicide years before and knew, first hand, what the impact of that was on the people around you. Because of this I didn’t go through with it, because I didn’t want to dump the pain I was feeling on everyone I left behind.
I told my parents what I was going to do that day, they knew I was doing poorly but they didn’t realise the full extent. They immediately rang the doctor and had me brought in to the psychiatric clinic in the next few days so that they could get me immediate help. I was doing my Leaving Cert but hadn’t attended school in four months because I had panic attacks everytime I tried to walk in the door. I was admitted to a home care programme, where a nurse assigned to me would come out to my house everyday, check how I was feeling, and help me get better.
I won’t sugar coat it, it took a while, I was seeing two separate counsellors a week in order to try get me to return to a healthy mental state. I walked around in a daze for weeks, my brothers were afraid to interact with me, my parents were afraid anything could tip me over the edge, so I lay in my bed all day, everyday.
Eventually I got better and returned to school, did my Leaving Cert and got into college, I got the course I wanted and moved out of my home. I was starting a whole new adventure. But the depression never fully left, I would still get days where I felt numb and nothing felt real, but I pushed through because I wanted my life to be better and not to fall down that hole again.
Well, I did. I started being very depressed again, I started self-harming again, I returned to everything I had fought so hard to get away from. I’m depressed again, and I know this is going to be something that comes and goes throughout my life based on the life my mother and grandmother lead. It runs in my family, but the thing is, I’m not sad about it. I know when I’m depressed it’s going to be so hard to get back out of, and it feels like it’s never going to end, but it will.
This may just seem like a story I wrote to tell everyone that there’s no end to the darkness you might be feeling, but this is exactly the opposite. I have read so many stories of people who were depressed and got through it and tell you to be strong and it will get better, but I want a story about someone who was depressed, got through it, and ended up getting depressed again. So I wrote it. That’s because I want whomever might be reading this to know, that if you slip up and relapse into whatever it may be you’re fighting, that doesn’t make you weak. It is not a sign to give up if you end up back at square one, because you have conquered this journey before and you can do it again. You just have to keep moving forward and even if you fall down 9 times, get back up 10 times, because there is no shame in fighting something you have already battled, just know that if you beat it once; you can beat it again.
Thumbnail by Daniil Zuzelev