It’s been a rough couple of weeks. Honestly, it’s been a rough semester altogether, mostly for reasons that it isn’t my place to reveal. And that’s not the point, so moving on, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about depression. My depression, in particular. Not my current depression, that I’ve mostly got a handle on and can’t really even be considered full out depression anymore. But my depression as I experienced it between the ages of 12 and 18.
I haven’t made it a secret about my struggle with depression and maintaining friendships and relationships and all that jazz. I just don’t see the point in denying it. My being depressed for a good portion of 8 years of my adolescence is just a fact to me, like my having brown curly hair or my affinity for peanut butter. It happened to me just like a trip to Disney Land happens. Moving on.
If I were to be more specific, I would say that lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how I dealt with depression back then, and ever since. And honestly? At first, I didn’t. Deal with it, that is. Obviously. I struggled with it for 8 years, so no DUH I wasn’t dealing with it.
See, back then, when I got depressed, I just clammed up and didn’t tell anyone, and then after a while I turned all that frustration and sadness and anger back on myself. I hated myself for a long time, and it was awful. And lately I’ve been thinking about how I stopped.
I think part of it was therapy. Maybe the actual therapy sessions didn’t do me much good, and maybe I didn’t come out of them sobbing with relief, having gotten over all my deep dark anxieties, but what therapy did was facilitate a conversation. By admitting I needed help, by proxy I had to start being more open, and by actually talking in depth about my problems in therapy it made it easier to talk about them with other people. I opened up a lot.
Of course, my mom would argue that I still pretend like nothing’s wrong sometimes, and she’s right. But everyone does that- especially if they’ve been depressed, because to them (us) every instance of sadness seems like the basement door back into full-blown depression. Thus, if we’re sad, we don’t want to tell anyone else, because we don’t want THEM to be sad too. Granted, it’s still something I need to work on, but I am working on it.
Even with my occasional lapses in full disclosure, I am a lot more open about things lately. The other day Ellen remarked that ever since she met me, even back on our voyages trip before school started, she was always struck by how open I was about what she refers to as my traumatic childhood. Really it’s just a traumatic adolescence, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is if you had asked any of my friends from middle or high school about me, “open” would not be a word with which they would have described me. And yeah, I still get sad sometimes, but confronting it head-on feels a hell of a lot better than sobbing alone in my room.
I don’t know what would have helped during those eight years to alleviate my depression. I did have people there for me, like my family and Rachel, but like most depressed teens I just assumed they wouldn’t understand my distress and so I didn’t tell them about it. And to an extent, they can’t understand my sadness, partially because a lot of it is specific to things that have happened in my life (in particular, constant bullying, the random loss of friendships, Sean), but understanding isn’t the point. If a friend of mine was an alcoholic, it wouldn’t be my place to even TRY to understand. As a friend or family member, your position is simply one of support. And maybe that’s what I needed back then- the ability to trust that my support system as I relied on it wasn’t going anywhere.
That’s been the hardest part for me recently- having to deal with that support system shrinking and falling away. I haven’t seen or spoken to Craig in over two years, I haven’t heard from Bart since April, my core friend group from high school is now just a series of disappointing memories, and my parents are no longer the unit they once were. And that’s rough, even for someone who has become much better adjusted in the past two years. And to tell you the truth, I don’t know how to resolve this issue, because geez, I’m only 20. I’m still a kid my most accounts.
But you know what I do know? That I will never again give up hope. Yeah, things suck, and yeah, the only reinforced lesson I’ve gotten from the string of people leaving me in the past couple years is that no matter how close you think you are to someone they have the full capacity to completely screw you over. But I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again- I refuse to learn that lesson. I will continue my bull-headed quest to foster lifetime friendships, I will continue making stupid jokes, I will continue randomly staying up until 2am doing online trivia games with people I might not even talk to a year from now, and I will continue trying. I will never stop trying, and nothing that anyone can say or do to me will change that. Because with or without you, I have a life to freaking live. And if you can’t keep up, that’s your loss. Not mine.
On an unrelated note, after this week’s Halloween with Gandalf there will be no Cooking with Gandalf episodes for a while, at least until February. Sorry for the inconvenience.
