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I first want to thank everyone and their kind words concerning my post last week about my journey and struggles with weight and self-image. My heart is full with your encouragement and outpouring of love. I am humbled to know that I inspire some of you. Part of this blog is to inspire you, as readers in many of the same ways my mentors have inspired me. I want to show you all that it is not an easy journey reaching our goals, but with hard work and dedication you can achieve anything. I have faith in you.
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I won't deny that I had a wonderful childhood. My parents are two of the most genuine and caring people I can think of, even with our differences and struggles as I grew up. I have two wonderful sisters and we fought like sisters do (sometimes more than others). I was close with my family, spent afternoons and summers with my cousins and grandparents. It was everything that a perfect childhood should have. Until it wasn't.
I will never forget that day in fourth grade. My best friend told me she no longer wanted to be friends with me because her other friends were better. That is a lot for a nine year old to take in. I remember crying and crying, my mom not able to understand what happened. Not that I understood either. It was the first time I realized your friends could hurt you.
After that, making friends became difficult. I was timid, shy to let new people into my life. At nine years old I became aware there was cruelty in the world and things could happen that I would never be able to explain.
When I was twelve years old, several girls in the seventh grade began to bully me. It was a time when bullying was not taken seriously. The principal told me bullying was a part of life, that I needed to learn how to deal. In response, my parents pulled me out of school and I started homeschooling.
This fear, the inability to trust, it never went away. Anyone who knows me knows, I am not the warmest person when you first meet me. I have walls up. I am quiet, standoffish. Dare I say even bitchy? I make people work for it and far too often, won't let anyone in at all. But the people I do let in, I hold on to for dear life. As if my own life depends on it.
But over the years, I have learned this dependency is just as harmful as never letting anyone in.
I moved out of my parents house in July 2014. It was overdue. Home was tight quarters and I needed my space. Or so I thought. It took me less than 24 hours from seeing my neice to break down crying in the grocery store because I missed her. Two or three weeks in and I missed having dinner with other people every night. One month in and I found excuses to stop going to church for fear of having to introduce myself to new people or venture anywhere other than the grocery store.
Two months later, in August, my youngest sister left to go to school in Montana. Saying goodbye to someone has never been so difficult in my entire life. It was like I was losing a part of myself. We may have been nine years apart, but we did everything together. As her older sister, I did my best to keep it together as we said goodbye in her bedroom that Sunday afternoon. But as soon as I went in to hug her, the floodgates opened. I remember going over to my friends’ house afterwards and sitting on his bed crying as he tried to feed me frozen yogurt - the only thing he knew always cheered it up. You would have thought someone had died. It was if I was the one that was leaving, the one who should be homesick. I came back to my apartment that night and cried myself to sleep.
I suddenly began to miss aspects of living with my parents: dinner, fights, even just having someone to sit next to on my couch. I was hyperaware of all the friends I left behind back home when I moved to downtown San Diego. I became aware of how much I missed everything I left behind to move out on my own to a neighborhood where I did not know a single soul. How much I missed my college friends even though we graduated four years earlier.
Three months into living on my own, I still only knew my next door neighbor and that was because he made the effort to get to know me.
I lost all motivation. For everything. In fact, I could not stop crying.
Once an avid runner, most days it took all of my energy to get out of bed and go to work. When I got home, I was immediately back in bed or on my couch. Blinds drawn. I pulled away from my family. I stopped sleeping and when I did sleep, I had horrific nightmares. I pulled away from my friends. I stopped talking to almost everyone. When I started crying at work too, not knowing why I was always so sad and upset, I knew I had to do something. This wasn't normal.
I was officially diagnosed with clinical depression in October 2014.
Part of me knew what my doctor and therapist were going to say. I knew there was a difference between sad and depression. But I didn't think that was me. That first day I met my therapist Bonnie, she asked me my name and I fell apart. I am pretty sure I cried the entire session, barely getting a word out. When I went to see my doctor, I kept it together until he asked me how I was really doing. He sat and listened as I blubbered. He spent over an hour talking to me, going over my options and talking to me about anti-depressants and my fears around them.
I started taking an anti-depressant in November 2014.
It has been almost eleven months since I was diagnosed. I see my therapist once a week and take an anti-depressant once a day. I have good days and I have bad days.
In all honesty, it took almost four months for the anti-depressants to start taking effect. I slept all of the time when I first went on them, lost all appetite. Most people would think those are wonderful side effects to have, but they are terrifying. Draining. Exhausting.
It took me two months from my diagnosis to tell my best friend from high school.
Three months to tell my best friend from college.
It took me almost six months to open up to my parents and sisters about my therapy and the methods my therapist and I are using to work though my past, my issues, my fears. While they were aware I was going to therapy, I wasn't open about it. With them or anyone else.
95% of my friends and family never knew what I was going through. Until now.
I am opening up about my depression and what I am going through to let everyone know they are not alone. Those nights I cried myself to sleep and thought things were never going to get better, I had to force myself to remember: I am not alone. My parents love me, my friends love me. All the times my parents didn't understand why I was still pushing them way even though I was on medication, I told myself "it is not their fault they don't understand."
Depression is so much more than the emotion of sadness. It can feel like you are falling down the rabbit hole in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It is scary and yet at the same time thrilling to be alone.
It took me almost seven months to start running and working out again.
Every day I look myself in the mirror and remind myself that things will get better. I still cry easily. Some days I have no energy and no desire to get out of bed. I still find myself watching hours of TV mindlessly, barely even paying attention.
Dating is something I am not even interested in. I know part of it is my depression and trust issues, even my fear of letting others in close. Another part of it is my desire to, for maybe the first time ever, focus on myself.
I am writing this not for self-pity, but to let my friends know, to let you my readers know, I am here for you. In my darkest hours, it was the friends who just sat next to me, holding my hand in silence as I cried that helped me through. You don't need to know what to say to someone who is suffering from depression because to be honest, there is nothing you can say. The anxiety attacks; the unreasonable sadness and lack of drive, we all experience it differently. It is what makes our journeys and us unique.
I will continue seeing my therapist until we both believe I am ready not to. I have no end date for when I will go off of my medication. I continue to push myself out of my comfort zone, but don't criticize myself when I pull away and hide in my apartment.
When you hear that someone has depression I want you to remember me. Fully functional and sometimes hiding behind an act. Scared of what is going to happen next, but working on my confidence. I am just one of the many faces of depression. One of the lucky ones to have a support group around me.
If you are struggling with depression or emotions you are unable to handle, I urge you to see someone and talk with them. There is no shame in having a mental disorder or taking medication. Honor and care for yourself as you would encourage someone you love and care for.
Do not fear the reactions of the world around you because they do not matter. My Dad still doesn't understand why I am seeing my therapist, but he trusts that I know what I am doing and that I am making the best deicision for me.
My name is Sarah. I am twenty-eight years old. And I am one of the many faces of depression.