I have no right to be depressed. I grew up in a solidly middle-class family with members who loved each other. I was smart. I had a dedicated, if somewhat small, group of friends. I went to a private, all-girls high school, then same one attended by my mom, my aunts, my cousins, and eventually my little sister. Sure, I'd always been overweight, frizzy-haired, and acne-prone, but overall a good life.
And yet. I wasn't happy. I was a strange kid, I know now. I didn't always understand social cues, and I was always buried in a book. I read a book once when I was young, around 11 or 12, set in a dystopian world where genetically modified people cut themselves so they can break through the brain-numbness and feel something. It struck something with me, and whenever I was excluded, whenever I was cut from a team, whenever I was alone on a Saturday night, I'd cut my hips, where no one could see them. I stopped by my senior year of high school, when I found a great group of friends and I thought I knew what I was going to do with my life. And then I went to college.
I went to a small school in a small city several hours from my hometown. I knew no one, and I was one of the few girls in the computer science department. I was close to my hall mates, and it made things okay. I started cutting the night after one of my classmates pushed me down against my bed and assaulted me. I tried to scrub my skin away under the hot shower. It didn't help, seeing him in all of my classes, but I tried.
Then I started my second year. I was away from the tight-knit freshman community in an on-campus apartment. My closest roommate joined a sorority, which I was against at the time, so I found myself alone all the time. I was okay at programming, but I knew it wasn't for me and I had no idea how to get out. My hips were always scratched.
I worked at a haunted house an hour away that October, and that kept me going for awhile. I had people to talk to every night, people who were weird and strange like me, people who genuinely cared. Scaring people was physical, and just damn fun. It almost seemed like I had a family again.
When November hit the loss of my haunt people depleted me. I had a bottle full of pain pills from an ear infection earlier that summer and one night, all alone in our apartment, I held them as I straddled the toilet. If I OD'd and vomited, I didn't want my roommates to have to clean it up. I didn't know how it worked. I downed two of the pills before I chickened out, just like I chickened out on everything in life.
By the next semester things were bad. I hardly went to my classes, because I was a failure who didn't care about Python or C. I cared about nothing. I had cases of Mountain Dew Code Red under my bed, because I hated the quiet moments before sleep, when you're all alone with your thoughts. The tiny voice within would whisper to me, telling me how I was wasting my parents' money, how no one could love someone as stupid, useless and ugly as me. So I'd down several cans, stay up until dawn, then pass out and sleep through my classes. It wasn't a good system.I was just so alone, and so hurt I couldn't see anything around me.
On February 21, one of my professors contacted campus security, concerned because I hadn't shown up to her classes. Security came to the apartment while I was out, and the one roommate who still talked to me demanded to know what was going on. I brushed her off, and tried to lock myself in my room. I was panicked. This was it. This was where everything fell apart. My family would find out how much of a slacker-loser I was, and they'd disown me. My parents would hate me, and my aunts and uncles wouldn't look at me over the Thanksgiving turkey. My friends would graduate and leave stupid me behind. I know I would have taken those pain pills and swallowed every single one of them that night, and if that didn't work instead of little cuts with my razor I would have aimed deeper. I know I would have died that night if that wonderful, wonderful friend hadn't left me alone. She wouldn't let me be; the walls of the apartment were too thin to ignore her.
She drove me to the hospital right down the road, and stayed by my side in the tiny admittance room. She even slept on the chair for awhile, until they finally decided to involuntarily hold me. I tried to back out, because I thought I was being ridiculous. I hadn't really hurt myself, and I freaked out when they said they wanted to have me stay a week. If I stayed a week, then my parents would find out. But in the end I didn't have a choice.
So began a week in the psych ward, in hospital scrubs, hospital-grade mesh underwear, and the bright yellow socks of a fall risk because the nurse who examined my naked body. A lot of it was boring, waiting for meals or for sessions. I was low on the patient hierarchy. Up top were the people in there for drug-related issues, then people who had actually tried to kill themselves, then me. But I was pale and ghost-like enough that I was left enough alone.
The nurses were amazing. I was heavily supervised, but they allowed me paper and the dangerous pencil to write. On Monday, they unlocked the rec room and I discovered they had a tiny library of books I could take down the hallway with me to the common area. They had the first four Harry Potter books, and those links to my childhood became my lifeline, my buoy. I was scared, and without a bra in front of strangers, but I had Harry, Hermione, and Ron by my side. Everyone, from Loki the graffiti-artist to the girl who claimed her boyfriend kept her as a sex slave, loved the older nurse Joanne. She'd been a paramedic, but when her son killed himself she decided she wanted to work in the psych units. We all hung on her every word. I didn't talk much to anyone there, but one morning as we were filtering out of the rec room from morning session, she stopped me, and looked at me. It was terrifying. No one had looked at me in awhile, as if I was a whole person and not just as a diagnosis or misfiring brain. She looked at me, and told me, "You are going to go do great things. You're not done yet."
My parents came to see me while I was there, and it was painfully obvious they were choosing their words carefully. Best not say anything to set her off, she'd already broken. I was terrified to tell them why I was there, but they didn't need to be told anything. They'd spoken to the hospital. They knew. And they accepted me. They were so understanding, and I don't think I could have made it without them. While I was locked away they packed up my room, and helped set things up with my school to withdraw.
My baby sister called me from her high school guidance counselor's office during the day, since we only had limited phone hours. At the time, I was ashamed that someone from my high school knew this deep dark secret about me, but I'm grateful they did. Hearing my sister's voice helped me sleep.
Those of us who were actually depressed, and not just there for drug addiction, got individual time with the psychologist. I'd sit in his office and stare out the window at the gray fire escape while he prodded me about my childhood, my likes, my future. "Why do your friends like you?" he asked. I had no answer. Why did my friends hang out with me? My voice is high and annoying, and often whiny. I'm not warm or particularly nice. I'm not funny. I'm not smart. I didn't know, so I asked my best friend when she called. And she, the most talented, caring, brilliant person I know, told me. The nurses had to gently take away the phone because I was crying too much. I...was loved? Someone loved me? Someone wanted to be around me? It was a beautiful, terrifying concept.
I spent a week in there, and I could write more on the characters I interacted with, and opinions I have on that hospital, but after a week they released me. My parents sat on either side of me as I told the dean of my school I was never coming back. I came home. I started going to outpatient therapy every day. God, there was one of the fellow patients there who smoked weed all the time to deal with her schizophrenia who'd tattle on my to our therapist when she noticed I was scratching at my hands when I was asked difficult questions. I hated her, but I miss her and hope she's doing better. She was too lovely.
I got a part-time job. I went to community college and got my associates degree, and then I transferred to a bigger school, still in my home city. I tried several therapists, and several different medications. I graduated, got a job, then got an even better job. I survived.
See, my brain is broken. It doesn't operate the way it should. And that's okay. I have Major Depressive Disorder, and Generalize Anxiety Disorder, but that's not all of me. I am more. This road has been difficult, and there were many days I cried in the bathroom of the outpatient facility because trying to fix this hurts. A part of me didn't want to give up the depression, either. It had been a part of me since I was young, and I didn't remember a time without it. It's like the small mole I have on my right elbow, ever-present, sometimes worrying. I was scared too, that my depression was the root of my creativity. All good authors and artists are tortured, aren't they, so how can I create anything if everything in my brain goes back to balance? I'm still wrestling with that.
Sometimes I want to go back in time and shake that girl I was five years ago. "Look what's ahead of you!" I want to shout. "You almost threw all this away! How could you be so stupid?" The universe is amazing, and incredible. The wheel turns, and I popped vilazodone. Some days are bad, and I cry in my car after a long day. Some days are good, and I still cry in my car. The stars rise every evening, and my soul rises to meet them.
