I have chronic depression.
When people read that sentence, some of their minds will immediately replace the word “depression” with “crazy” – maybe even “insanity” – on the days that they’re feeling especially nice. Despite the stigmas surrounding this phrase (and the groups accusing me of being lazy, fake or unmotivated), I am not ashamed to admit my poor mental health, no more than I would be of admitting my age.
Now recovery stories are messy things. They have no real ending and often, you will find them stopping and restarting at random intervals. Most of the conflict is internal, with no real villain and a disappointing lack of action for a story revolving around fighting. The main character often hides so you can’t even see them.
Which is why I am not writing a recovery story. This is just a story with a happy ending.
I had my first proper experience with depression when I was twelve years old and according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), only 2.1% of children around this age have been recorded to experience depression, so I was a special case. I can never pinpoint exactly where these experiences started. One day I was perfectly okay – I was a star student in school, I had plenty of friends, I was eating – and the next thing I knew, I wasn’t. It happened so slowly, so gradually, that I couldn’t tell where it started and where it ended. Before I knew it, my grades were dropping in school because I couldn’t motivate myself to even care about my homework and I was fading out into the background of my friend group, not quite gone but not quite there either, like a ghost. Nobody seemed to notice my newfound transparency, which only caused me to blend more into the background. I spent a large majority of my time in my room, away from my family. My mother, who was constantly working, had her own mental struggles to work through, and facing my abusive stepfather felt worse than isolating myself. The only people I allowed inside my room were my siblings, my two-year-old sister and my little brother who only knew how to crawl at the time. As annoying as they were, they were a breath of fresh air.
I dealt with these newfound feelings; feelings of sadness, loneliness and on the worst days, emptiness, by not eating. It was an unconscious decision on my part. I would find myself pushing food around my plate in the school cafeteria, laughing at whatever a friend said in order to make it seem like I wasn’t purposely avoiding my lunch, tossing a full tray away whenever the bell rang. Over the summer, my sleep schedule was shredded to the point where I slept until 7 p.m. and then stayed awake until the sun came up. I was never around for lunch or dinner which only further hindered my appetite. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have an eating disorder and I wasn’t purposely starving myself for any reason. It was just that I was so drained of energy that even eating felt like an insurmountable task. This went on for years, to the point where if I ever did try to eat a proper amount, it would make me physically sick. In fact, it was only last year that my body adapted to eating regularly.
Courtesy: Broken Light Collective
I wasn’t properly diagnosed until I went to a hospital.
I reached my junior year in high school before I knew that I couldn’t keep hiding it anymore. I had spent four years hiding inside of myself, afraid that if I told anyone, I would be accused of faking it, over exaggerating or just being dramatic – and many times, I fully believed that I was. I had spent four years in a silent fight that went on only inside my head – my brain fighting to keep me alive when I refused to do it myself. Yes, I self-harmed. Yes, I was suicidal. Yes, I thought I could handle it myself.
But I couldn’t.
So, I went to somebody I could trust. She was a teacher – one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. Even years after graduating high school, I am still friends with this teacher. From there I was taken to the school counselor. A police officer took me to a mental hospital. (Don’t take it the wrong way, it was completely voluntary. I wasn’t dragged away on a stretcher or stuffed into the back of the police car. The counselor asked me directly if I felt that being admitted would help me and I said yes. Simple as that.)
I won’t bore you with the hospital visit. I spent three days sitting on a couch surrounded by kids that ranged from five to seventeen, watching kids cartoons while the nurses watched over us and nearly died from boredom. My mom came to visit me. My roommate was an exchange student from Germany who was there for the same reason I was. The food was disgusting. I was seen by a psychiatrist and prescribed my first medication. It wasn’t exciting.
When I was released, I thought that was it. I was better now. I could go about my life as a normal person.
I was wrong.
I was supposed to return to see a counselor for a check-up a week after being released. I never made it. I saw a therapist a few times, but we couldn’t afford to keep going. Eventually, we fell into a routine of tiptoeing around the subject and after that, never speaking about it again. That was it.
Courtesy: Manuela Thames
I didn’t decide to seek help again until I came to college, where I started seeing Dr. Elizabeth Curci at the Health and Wellness Center. No, she is not a psychiatrist (my insurance won’t cover a psychiatrist), nor is she a therapist. She is a regular ARNP working in the Family Medicine Department on the fourth floor and she is an absolute saint. A year later, I’m not ashamed to say that I am still seeing her and we are both working hard to find the medications that work well for me. Whenever I come in, she asked me how I am doing, takes the time to listen to my troubles and allows me to talk to her about anything; no matter how poorly my day is going or how my mood is that day, she never fails to cheer me up.
Now, I did not write this story for it to be a sob story. I don’t want pity, charity or for anyone to feel sorry for me. On the contrary, I wrote this story to show my strengths. I wrote it in the hopes that somebody out there will read it and see themselves between the lines and will see that someone else has been through their struggles to realize that, as lonely as they feel, they are not alone. I wrote it in the hopes of inspiring somebody to take that first step in getting help or motivate somebody to start back on their medication or call their therapist who they haven’t seen in three months. I wrote this for those who feel that they are losing their own battles.
I spent six years in a state of depression. Six years of feeling lonely and empty. I never planned for the future because I never thought the future would come. When I was twelve, I never thought I’d make it to high school. When I was sixteen, I never thought I’d make it to graduation. When I was eighteen, I didn’t think I’d make it to college.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
The same old “things will get better” spiel does get old after a while – trust me, I know. But maybe the people who say them and come up with the motivational speeches and self-help articles aren’t just typical people who have never known a thing about depression; maybe they are just like us. Maybe they have spent years fighting their own battles and desperately want to help those that they see their younger selves in. Maybe they’re still fighting. And even if they’re not, that’s the reason I wrote this and shared my story.
Two years ago, I was a senior in high school who was unsure if she would make it to graduation. I was almost a year clean from relapsing and struggling not to fall back down. I wasn’t eating, severely underweight and struggled with severe insomnia. I spent long nights awake wondering if this was all there is, wondering if depression would always have its hold around my throat. And I knew (I thought that I knew) that eventually, I would lose.
Do you want to know what I’m doing now?
As I’m writing this, I’m sitting next to my girlfriend of three years in her apartment, listening to her ridiculously stupid hamster roll around the floor in his ball. We are laughing as my best friend dances around the living room to whatever song is blasting at the moment. My chest is not weighed down by the overwhelmingly heavy feeling of emptiness, nor am I plagued by the loneliness that used to keep me company. I am in college, in a major that I absolutely love, when I swore to myself that I would never make it here. And no, I am not cured. I don’t know if I will ever be “cured.” I am taking antidepressants. I still see Dr. Curci every few weeks. I still have bad days and worse days and days where I can’t get out of bed. But while depression has not quite released my throat, it has definitely loosened it’s grip to the point where I can breathe easily. And I finally feel like I am actually living. I hugged rock bottom and then used it as a foundation to build back up. I haven’t quite reached the top yet, but that’s okay. At least I can see it now.