My Struggle With Depression

* trigger warning: I talk about suicidal thoughts in this post. If you are sensitive to that topic you may want to consider skipping this post or reading with a friend *

Depression. This word carries a lot of ugly meaning in today’s society but it is far more common than many people think. Many people either oversell depression as some terrible disease that always leads to suicide or undersell it and use it synonymously with being sad. Depression occurs when the dendrite receptors release the serotonin neurotransmitters too soon during synaptic transmission. This alters the brain chemistry and causes the brain to not have enough serotonin which is the “happy chemical.” Not all depression is clinical like this, sometimes it is more emotional, but both have the same symptoms. If the depression is clinical, SSRI’s can help. SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor which means it helps the receptors hold on to the serotonin for enough time for the brain to have the effect. All that being said, I am not a doctor or an expert, I am simply sharing what I have learned through research. This is the story of my journey with depression.

My struggle with depression started the end of my sophomore year of high school. For years I didn’t know what it was, it wasn’t until my senior year that I started to realize I was struggling with depression. Depression looks different for everyone. At the start of my struggle with depression it manifested in the form of emptiness, distancing myself, low self esteem, and pulling away from things I enjoyed. Thats how it was for the first few years. It wasn’t until my senior year that my depression started to manifest in the form of suicidal thoughts. I feel like there is a huge stigma in our society around suicidal thoughts, but people can experience it in so many different ways. I never truly understood suicidal thoughts until I experienced them myself. What many people don’t understand about suicidal thoughts (myself included) is that it isn’t always a conscious intentional thought, in fact it (in my case) almost never was. For me, it was just thoughts and ideas that would just flood into my mind. It was like a nightmare while I was wide awake. I didn’t know why it was happening and I couldn’t control it. Over time the thoughts got more vivid and came more often and they started to feel like my own thoughts. I felt hopeless, worthless, and like no one would miss me if I were gone. Sometimes I was even convinced that everyone would be better off without me. Honestly it was really scary and that was when I really started to realize I had a problem that I needed to address.

The summer after my senior year was really hard for me. I had withdrawn from nearly all my friends to the point where I spent most of my time in my room binge watching tv. This was also the summer I got engaged so there were a lot of positive emotions as well. The thing with depression is that it doesn’t care about your conscious emotions, you can be experiencing the most amazing things and have such loving people in your life and still be experiencing depression, suicidal thoughts, and emptiness. I was ecstatic to be engaged and planning to marry my best friend but my depression was still something I was actively struggling with and for the most part I was doing it silently. I was so scared and ashamed of how people would see me if they knew what I was struggling with. I was afraid that people would think I was weak for being so “sad” when I had so much to be happy about, I was scared that my family would think I was broken and blame themselves, and mostly I was afraid of anyone asking me why I was depressed because there really wasn’t a reason.

The end of that summer I left for college. I was living in a dorm room 2 hours away from all my family and my fiancé, and I was 4 hours away from the only friends I stayed in contact with the summer before I left. I spent the first week being there crying nearly everyday. I felt even more alone and more empty than ever before and I had even less opportunity to talk about how I was feeling. Luckily within a few short weeks I was able to reconnect with an old friend who was also in the dorms just a few buildings away. It helped me deal a lot with the feelings of loneliness and the fact that I was so far away from the people I had been close to. I had finally accepted that this depression was something I would just have to learn to live with. I found that talking about it helped a lot, especially when the person understands what I’m going through. Soon after starting school I got diagnosed with an anxiety disorder which I was pretty much already aware of. I was still coping with having depression so I lied on the mental health questionnaires to avoid an actual depression diagnosis.

Once spring rolled around, finals started happening, the wedding was quickly approaching and my depression was back in full force. I had been in poor living conditions for the whole year 2 hours away from the only place that felt like home. I felt lost, hopeless, useless… overall I felt like a failure. I felt like I wasn’t good enough and I felt like everyone else would be better off without me. My suicidal thoughts were back, but this time they felt like my own the whole time. That’s how depression works. It attacks your mind, your thoughts, and makes you feel broken and alone. I opened up about my thoughts to my best friend and she helped me work through it long enough to finish the semester and go back home to plan the wedding. The depression subsided leading up to the wedding and in the weeks after the wedding. I started to work at a job after our honeymoon that was the first consistent job I ever had. I was working as an assistant for a safety company. I got to work for an amazing and understanding boss for the whole summer and my depression was better than it had been the whole year.

In August, Jon and I moved into our first apartment in Clovis. Once school started, Jon was working 3 days a week and those days I was done with school at noon and spent the rest of the day alone at the apartment. Being alone has always been hard for me, it’s been even harder since I started struggling with depression. When I am alone, I spend more time mulling over my own thoughts and my own thoughts are where my low self esteem and suicidal thoughts are. When I’m alone, my depression takes over and even the simplest tasks seem impossible. A few months into the semester, I realized I had experiencing a plethora of odd symptoms including fatigue, lack of sleep, hair loss, heart burn, nausea, and migraines. The practitioner had me take the mental health survey (the one I used to lie on) and I told the truth. She diagnosed me with depression and suggested I see one of the University’s therapists. Therapy has been difficult for me because it is hard for me to tell strangers the truth about how I am feeling. The therapist soon caught on to the fact I wasn’t being honest about how I was feeling. The truth is, it’s a work in progress. I’m still trying to work on talking about my depression and therapy is still hard for me but it’s progress.

A big part of starting therapy is realizing that it still won’t fix me. It may help me feel better but it won’t make me better, and that’s okay. I have started to come to terms with the fact that I may have to go on antidepressants. For awhile the idea of taking pills for my depression scared me. I was afraid it would change me. I now have done research and found that it could really help me if it comes to that. I know I still have a lot of work to do in therapy before I start taking antidepressants but now I am less scared. This whole journey has come with a lot of learning and growth. It definitely has made things harder but I believe that there is a reason for all of it. I believe there is a reason for everything. And if my story can help start a conversation, or help someone know they’re not alone, or help someone see that it’s okay to get help then it will be worth it. That’s why I am sharing my story. This story was actually a lot harder to write than I thought it would be, but I’m glad it’s finally out there. Depression is ugly, but you don’t have to go through it alone and it doesn’t mean you’re broken.

This past year I have learned that certain things can help my depression and other things can make it worse. I know that being alone can make it worse, but staying active, talking to people I care about, and being productive all can help. I am still learning and I know that every person and every case is different, but I have learned that suffering alone is the worst thing you can do. Many people suffer, but no one has to do it alone. I may have depression, but it doesn’t have to have me.