We all have our crosses to bear. There isn't a single one of us destined for a life without heartache, without illness, without chaos, without pain. We were meant to withstand some of the harshest experiences, not to throw our hands up to the heavens screaming why, but rather to be grateful for the moments when everything is still, quiet, peaceful, and right. The happy moments. The good moments.
In this life, we will have them both: heartache and happiness. On this cold January morning, the predominant one for me would be heartache, knowing that a boy down the street struggled with a mental illness that most knew nothing about. He fought. He wrote. He traveled. He tried. He really tried. But the illness killed him. As his mother wrote, the illness took him just as cancer takes its victims. My heart breaks trying to understand how his family must feel in this moment, knowing that they can't ask him the questions that are probably playing like a broken record over and over in their mind.
Seeing as this is a blog about confessions, I feel the need to confess something that I have hardly talked about in my adult life. I hope that you will put away any preconceived notions you may have about mental illness in order to take the following words for exactly what they are, not what societal context has shaped them to be.
I was diagnosed with clinical depression at the age of 16.
Depression is more than a sadness. It is the kind of pain that feels woven into the very fabric of who you are. It makes you question the reason you are here, who loves you, why they would ever love you, and how you could ever feel normal again after feeling this horrible. It tricks you into thinking it could never get better, that you're never going to be good enough, and that happiness isn't meant for you. It physically hurts, with the kinds of aches and pains that you can never explain. It makes even crawling out of bed feel like climbing a mountain. It is painful. It is exhausting. It is terrifying.
The most frustrating misconception about depression for me was that I, or anyone else living with the depression, can simply "snap out of it." Let's be clear: the depression I am referring to is not a sadness brought on by a single person or situation. It is not a day or week-long slump. It is far greater and more intense than any situational sadness. It is a chemical imbalance of serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine in the brain. It is not a choice. It is not a weakness. It is an illness.
For years, I took medication. I remember exactly what the pills looked like, felt like, tasted like. For some, these little pills do exactly what they are designed to do. They can shorten the time each bout of depression takes, while also lessening the intensity of the pain. I can't say that they didn't serve this function for me; my pain was definitely less intense. But, unfortunately, so was my happiness. I didn't have the low lows anymore but I was also not feeling the high highs that I had felt my entire life.
I am a woman with a wide spectrum of emotions. Not feeling the intense emotions I was so accustomed to scared me. I made the decision to go off of my medication. This is not something I would ever just nonchalantly recommend to anyone struggling with mental illness. Just like the decision to go on medication, a decision to go off medication is something each person must choose for themselves with the guidance of a doctor.
If you are living with mental illness, remember that you are never alone, even when it feels that way. You are loved. You are cared about. You have a purpose. If you are somebody who has never understood mental illness, I hope that you will try to look at it from the side of empathy and compassion rather than fear and judgment. For every single one of you who took the time to read this: thank you. Discussing depression is one of the most difficult things for me to do because I've worked so hard to try to "get rid" of it. I changed the way I lived, the way I ate, the way I slept, the way I spent my free time - all so that I could try to cure myself. What I've learned after all these years is that there is no cure. Though I am healthier, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and otherwise, the depression isn't gone. It is just as much a part of me as my passion to write, my love of carbohydrates, my freckled shoulders. Depression does not define me but I will not ignore its existence. This is me. All of me. And I, for the first time in my life, am not ashamed of that.
