I was instilled with the values of a person’s purpose in life is to glorify and serve their divine creator, and if one is not able to do so, one’s not doing anything valuable with one’s life. Which I didn’t completely grasp in those words when I was four or five years old, but I think sat with me and did, in some ways, that I no longer so feel the need to describe I was not living my life in 100 percent devotion to my divine deity because I did not believe in this divine deity that caused this disconnect between what I felt like would make me, would give me value, and the actual value I was perceiving in myself.

Which brings me to where I am today in my journey with depression. I still feel symptoms of depression fairly often. Sometimes it’s just a feeling more down than usual for a day, sometimes it is this feeling that everything is hopeless and why should I even get out of bed. But with this kind of time to process the new perspectives on my life and my illness that I have learned from other people I’ve met, from books that I’ve read, from professional therapists, who I intend to begin seeing again as soon as I am back at the university. I think that I’m able to recognize those symptoms when they start to emerge and “deal with” is a vague term that means differently, in different scenarios, and try out new and fall back on improving from me, coping mechanisms to navigate my life, and my work with those symptoms.

Having a sense of structure in place, in terms of a systematic vocabulary with which to view my illnesses, with which in terms of a step by step practical plan with which to address my symptoms. Having a sense of structure has been a very powerful and concrete way of combatting the abstract way, but this power idea that nothing makes sense and there is nothing that I can do. Having a sense of structure has given me maps on which I can definitely locate myself in where I am and where I want to be.

I would absolutely want to give the message that, not that it gets better because that’s not a thing that magically happens, but there is almost always the means with which a situation can be made better. Sometimes that involves extricating yourself from situation that are unsalvageable. Sometimes that involves taking an honest, sometimes painful, look at your own self and your own behavior and making a determined effort to change it. Sometimes it involves trying to unlearn very painful but powerful ways of looking at the world that are not the most healthy and trying to maybe learn new ones in their place. Sometimes it involves just eating an ice cream cone. There is almost always the possibility of a situation being made better it involves a lot of work, but it can be done.

I believe that each individual constructs their own sense of purpose and meaning of life, constructs their own system by which they judge themselves to be valuable or not valuable. I absolutely think that religious faith can be an appropriate and healthy and good and beneficial way in which someone can construct their view of the world and of themselves. I also think that it is possible for religious faith, like any framework of looking at the world, to be unhealthy or destructive or negative.

Around age 14, I went through an experience that made me question my devotion to the Christian faith, and, ultimately, I decided that I no longer believed in the tenants of the religion I was raised in, and that was when my first bout of depression had lasted many, many months occurred, due to a variety of reasons: The stress of having to conceal what I knew my parents would not approve of from my family and from the rest of my community; my nagging fear of what if I’m wrong, what if I go to hell, I don’t want to go to hell, which is a thing that tends to make people uncomfortable. And along with that just the typical growing pains of adolescence of, you know, I was raised to believe the world is, I wasn’t raised to believe that. I grew up thinking that the world is very safe and secure place and I’m now starting to sense that in some cases it is, in some cases it is not. Magnified, in my typical the case, by the extremity of the stakes that had been attached to my religious beliefs.

Going into summer, I was on academic probation from the university. Yeah. With threat of academic suspension. I had no real structure. I had a job that I was consistently calling out of because I was not able to get myself up in the morning to go to work. Things were generally not good, and I was u making constant emergency visits to student counseling, who eventually told me, hey, this is not a sustainable. They recommended that I begin an intense outpatient program

In retrospect, I believe that I was referred to this hospital, somewhat, disingenuously. When I checked in to ask about the intensive outpatient program, I was deemed a danger to myself and others and committed involuntary to psychiatric holding for a week, which ended up having a positive effect on me. It really forced me to take stock with my life and to kind of delve into the issues of my past that have led me to this point in extremely intensive setting environment. So, while I don’t think that I needed hospitalization at that point, I do think it was a huge help.

Yeah. My first night there, I just lay on my bed in my room in complete darkness, and I recall the thought coming to me of how the hell did my life get to this point? And the rest of the week was, in large part, waiting for someone to confront the answers to that question. The scheduled therapy at the hospital was extremely intensive. It’s usually under order of six or seven hours of therapy a day from a variety of angles. There was this group therapy in which we would talk about our feelings. There was art therapy in which we would try to express them through drawing. There was psychodrama in which we would act them out, which was I was very drawn to. There was spiritual therapy, which I did not find helpful, but, yeah. But the interesting thing about being in a mental hospital is that, is you’re interacting with your fellow patients and you’re all tackling the issues that you each are dealing with. You get to know each other very well, very quickly. So, a couple of positives came out of that dynamic that I achieved with my group in the hospital. This sense of not being alone and that other people were dealing with the same kinds of issues and symptoms that I was dealing with was very helpful. This sense of increased empathy that I gained from seeing other people in situations worse than mine, people with substance addictions, people who have been living with these symptoms for longer, people who have been living with these symptoms without the resources that I began to recognize I could employ, people who had lived through more severe traumas, that might not be a helpful way of phrasing it, but people who had lived with greater complications to their own system than I had. That increased empathy that I was forced to attain from my experience with my fellow patients gave me a healthier, more balanced view of my symptoms. Just the fact that I was constantly getting perspective from my patients and from my therapist about these issues that I was really putting into words for the first time gave me the beginnings of the tools with which to analyze myself and try to improve myself thereafter. That was where I first inhabited the term “codependency”, for instance, which has been a huge help in my identifying problematic patterns of behavior and thinking that I think exacerbate depressive tendencies and learning to weed them out of my life, for example.

I believe that each individual constructs their own sense of purpose and meaning of life, constructs their own system by which they judge themselves to be valuable or not valuable. I absolutely think that religious faith can be an appropriate and healthy and good and beneficial way in which someone can construct their view of the world and of themselves. I also think that it is possible for religious faith, like any framework of looking at the world, to be unhealthy or destructive or negative. In my personal experience, I was raised to value, loving God, and compassion for other people above anything else. And while that mixed in with the unhealthy behaviors and dynamics that I’ve learned from my family and from other families in the community which I was raised, those values manifested themselves early on in me as the sense of needing to sacrifice myself to an unhealthy [inaudible] for God and other people. And while I no longer believe in God or explicitly subscribe to the idea that I have to give myself beyond what is reasonable, compassion and empathy, forging connections and understandings with as many people as possible in as many degrees as possible to as deep level as possible is something that gives my life a great deal of meaning. And something that I find a great sense of comfort and in pursuing.

I was spending hours a day in my room, sometimes never leaving my room. And that was the second period of extended, prolonged depression that I felt. I’d been seeing a counselor with the university for most of that year, but they were very surface level chats in which I’d say, again, this happened to me in my childhood, but I hadn’t really processed how it was still affecting me. And, all of a sudden, I changed on a dime, to be constantly coming in setting up emergency meetings. Not because I was actively suicidal, though I was experiencing suicidal ideation at that point, but just because this sense of being overwhelmed was overwhelming and I didn’t have any other outlet with which I could articulate that.

I don’t know with a 100 percent certainty what the rest of my life is going to entail. it would not surprise me, based on my experiences with depression so far, what I’ve read of academic studies if depression, and what I’ve learned of other people’s experience with it, it would not surprise me if I continued to feel these symptoms for the rest of my life. But it also would not surprise me if, as life went on, even if I did experience more severe episodes than what I’ve experienced so far, I’d get, hopefully, better and better about recognizing what goes on in my brain and enacting consistent and healthy and I feel like there should be a third adjective, but I can’t think of one, so consistent and healthy plans and coping with my symptoms with which to, not get rid of them, but process them but in a beneficial way.

I was dating this girl who was extremely visibly broken from the abusive environment in which she was raised. So, I would think to myself, yes, of course, I do need to be there for her six, seven hours a day on Skype because, like, otherwise, how is she going to function in the world? Which stemmed from another way it could have manifested itself, which is the sense of I need to give and give and give and give and give because that is what my value in the world is. But it was also, in a way, very controlling. The sense of, like, I am the one who will take care of this person. It is on me, no one else can do it. Which leads to a lot of stress because that is not a stable way to have a relationship. It leads to feelings of anger and resentment that you are being taken advantage of even if you put yourself in the situation in which you allow yourself to be taken advantage of. It leads to feelings of worry because you’ve made another person’s problems your problems, but, ultimately, it’s on the other person to take care of their problems, and if they’re not doing it, there’s no way you can make them. And it can lead to this, all of those bad feelings and unhealthy ways of viewing oneself can lead to this sense of feeling my depression, feeling like everything is hopeless, feeling like your best efforts are not good enough, feeling like you don’t have any value, feeling like you are worthless.

For a long period of time in first couple years of school which I was extremely depressed, it did make doing theater work, which is the kind of art that I most want to create with my life, made it somewhat unpeaceful. Theater does demand a consistent and rigorous commitment to attending rehearsals regularly, to being vulnerable, to the somewhat extreme emotional demands working in a story can take you to. It does necessitate open frequent communication with many, many other people, but in a way it has also given me this unique perspective that I have that nobody else does with which I can tap into certain stories and certain characters and certain moves and tease them out of their actors, out of myself if I’m acting or other actors if I’m directing, out of designers and out of anyone who works on a show. It gives me this ability to engage with the art I want to make on an emotional level that I don’t think I would be able to access if I weren’t drawing from this pain in my past.

I’ve been living with depression on and off since I was eight years old, I’m 22 now. Of course at age eight, I didn’t think of it in terms of depression or mental illness or anything of that nature, but I recall at that age spending many nights lying awake in bed feeling this kind of gnawing emotional pain without overly identifiable cause. At the time, I framed it in terms of feeling vaguely empty inside and not knowing why. My parents suggested, like, maybe you’re hungry or you have a stomachache or something like that. And, at the time, as this went on, I thought it primarily in religious terms because I was raised in a very conservative religious house. I thought that I was not pleasing God or God was not happy with me or something of that nature, and I wasn’t sure what to do about those feelings, so I just kind of tamped them down, and that happened on and off throughout my early childhood.