depression. isolation. darkness. for the longest time, those were the things that consumed my life. and for awhile, those things drove me to believe i didn’t need to live. you see for a long time this year i dealt with depression and probably a bucket load of mental health issues, but we’ll just stick with depression. a quick google search will tell you that depression is a mental health disorder characterized by persistently depressed mood or loss of interest in activities, causing significant impairment in daily life. while you can define what depression is, what it actually is in a person’s life is a different story.
it started with isolation, but it progressed with everything else. as i saw it all of my friends were busy and i didn’t want to bother them, so i spent every single day alone, in my room. as time progressed, the time i spent alone in my room was time spent crying. everyday. it was day after day, it was like deja vu where i’d cry about everything for hours. because it felt like i was wrong. i felt like that my friends wouldn’t choose to talk to me because there was something wrong with me. it felt like that the reason that everything that was going on in my life was being there was something wrong with me. but as time went on, i learned it really wasn’t. you see that there was so much going wrong on in my life, it felt like my fault.
but not only was it affecting me just at home. it totally consumed my thoughts all the time. at school, at home, at work. at school i would try to talk to people as little as possible because i was scared to, considering it felt like people hated me for who i was. i put on a different persona, one that would hide all the pain i was feeling inside. it affected me to lose effort in everything. i wore jeans and a sweatshirt everyday. it was affecting my health to. i would go home, eat, and go to sleep for a few hours just so i wouldn’t have to interact with people. since those were the only hours people were awake. it caused me such an immense amount of pain in me. it felt like a million knives were stabbing me at once, stabbing the goodness in my heart. this hole that i went down, affected everything that i had going on in my life.
it truly felt like i kept on going down a bottomless hole of loneliness and darkness and i couldn’t see myself coming out of it. one day, i really couldn’t handle packing it in anymore. despite all the people that i have ever known saying that they were there for me and that i could talk to them anytime, it wasn’t true. those people who said that had distanced themselves with me so much so they didn’t really talk to me at school. but it wasn’t just them who were distanced from me, i took the extra step of pushing people away. so far away i didn’t even think we were actually friends. this is not recommended. i pushed everyone away. even the one person who had always been there for me. i felt like that i had annoyed, frustrated, and pestered him so much, that i didn’t think i could even tell him that there was something wrong. this one person was the only person who i ever told that there was something wrong, every anxiety attack and breakdown. but it felt like i couldn’t talk to him either. so there i was, truly alone. but that one day. that one day i told somebody who wasn’t even my best friend but somebody who i could at least kind of tell and that was the first step.
i decided that this was a matter i had to take into my own hands. i started to wake up for school and get dressed to look nice. then the next week i began getting back onto snapchat and began talking to the people i once considered my friends. i got back out there. i made plans to hangout with people. unfortunately, my turning point came at the last month of school and what i went through not only ruined my life, but my grades. so i began rebuilding. and i truly came to a point where it felt like i was ok. i don’t know how to describe it but it felt like i was standing in the microsoft startup screen, and for that landscape, that’s my peace.
so the question is, why would i tell this story? i suck at telling the story and getting to point and i definitely missed a million things that happened but that was like a good enough summary to say the least. but i felt like it was another story that needed to be heard. there’s so many ways you can interpret this story to draw your own themes. but here is just one thing you can take out of it: everything people say is said so often that it turns into cliche. “im here for you,” shit like that. because nobody was. but what i want people to know is that you’re gonna be ok. this isn’t a new experience, and there are people to help you. it’s hard to find the right person, but the person who will sit there and be there to give you the biggest mom hug is there. no matter what mess you’re in, you’re going to be ok. you’re going to find a way out of this shit hole. it might take some time but don’t forget that you’re not alone. the pain you’re feeling right now? that shit fucking hurts. absolute shit. but it’s going to be ok. i know it.