Ok I think that I have felt different than a lot of my peers for almost as long as I can remember. Even in young childhood everyone was very happy and go lucky and I had this, not that I didn’t have moments of happiness but I always had this gnawing, underlying sense of sadness. there was I always had these very deep darker thoughts and when I would ask you know friends that were my age whether they had ever thought about that, the thought you know had never crossed their mind. And I found that so odd, why do I feel this way when nobody else does, nobody else has ever even had the concept of that before

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.

when I was a junior, something just clicked and I just became very irritable and everything just seemed to bother me and I just had a negative outlook on life and just everything was hard for me to do. And I just approached things in such a negative way and I didn’t know what was going on and people were noticing that my personality had changed and I didn’t know what was going on, other people didn’t know what was going on, people thought that I was just being rude or kind of arrogant and it wasn’t until later that I discovered that I did have depression and it’s been a long journey but I progressed and. It got to the point where I dealt with that for about a year just, just like, just didn’t feel like myself and struggled with daily things, but it was manageable and bearable and I got through that, but I never really reached out for help and I never really put too much thought to it. I just kind of thought that my life was speeding up and things were changing and that’s just how it was, that was what was going on. So within the next year and a half it just progressed and got more serious to the point where I, I felt ashamed of the way that I had really secluded myself from others and I was not as outgoing as I had been. I didn’t feel really welcome in my school environment and I just and it was just all in my head. It was not that anything had ever happened to me it was just all of a sudden something in my, something in my mind just decided to go wacky and. It, it really started to become a problem my senior year in high school.

Ok. So I think I was about 13 when it first started, I didn’t really understand what it was. I just knew that I felt like crap. I didn’t understand what it was, it felt like there was just a black cloud over my head, sort of. And it just sort of felt like there was a weight I was carrying around all the time. I didn’t really understand it. And I didn’t, I don’t even know if I heard the word depression until my parents took me to the doctor once and just talked with the doctor about how I was acting out and I was disagreeable a lot and wouldn’t do things that they wanted me to do, like clean my room and the doctor brought it up. Like, Oh, this actually could be depression.

Yeah, I mean, it must have been pretty bad because we do not live in the same city. And so they were just hearing it over the phone. I think that just, you know, through the years of like conversations like at some point I’m just like, yeah. Yep. Ok. And yeah, like I think my dad was the first person to mention something and it was like, you sound miserable. You sound horrible and I was like, nah, whatever. And it was like, yeah a couple of conversations he kept bringing it up and I was like, at one point I was like, “damn!,” I mean, it’s not even like misery it’s like I’m just, there’s nothing and like there, like. There’s just nothing to care about.

and then I went up and saw all of them for like, some Halloween thing. I don’t know. It, I had a discussion about it and it just seemed like a good idea and it was nice to see that I actually like had family support on this and it just seemed like, you know, I was like if I talked to somebody and this didn’t seem like it was a good idea, it’s like I could always quit at any point and I don’t know, just lack of options. It was like, yeah. Like I said earlier, it was like anything is better than this. Even like a, like even feeling like worse or bad or worse in a different way, like anything would have been better than just like, I don’t know. Like, nothing but like an annoying or I don’t know, like. You’ve got, like the most uncomfortable nothing.

Yeah. How did you, in the midst of that nothingness actually get yourself to make that first move and look up that?

Well I mean I was, keeping in touch with my family helped a lot.

I realized at that point that there was definitely there was definitely something more serious. I didn’t have the resources to really talk about it with anyone. My parents kept saying you know, You just need to learn to be happy and to stop being anxious and you, you can do all of this yourself. It’s a self-care thing. And although self-care is really important in learning how to kind of regulate your own mood, they’re just some like, after the years of experience in traumatization I got from depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, I did not know how to handle it myself and I did not have the resources to but because there were people around me, not knowing what was really going on and telling me you know, You can just get over it yourself, I wasn’t able to access the proper help that I needed to at that point.

And I realized that you know, Something is really wrong and I can’t so this on my own but I really don’t know who to talk to. And I don’t think I am brave enough to go seek help, Because I was, because of how my family perceived getting help, you know therapy and mental illness I didn’t, I thought I’d be shaming them if I went to go seek help and this is a dangerous mentality to get into because if you, if you allow other people to influence your thoughts like that then it’s just it’s not a very good situation and so.

Everyone is already assumed to be mentally healthy. Everyone well I mean especially in my family and you know talking about some of these issues with other people, I have very strong people in my family tend to have very strong sense of self and a very strong sense of how we handle our own emotional mishaps. And so it’s not in our vocabulary to say, Oh you think, you, you know, you tend to be sad consistently. This is not really what they understand and of you do end up in that situation, they’re just like, Well you pick yourself up and you deal with it, Or you know, Just be happy. And you know it’s I really do hate the just be happy things because it’s really like first of all I really don’t want to be happy. Second of all, how, I can’t just be now.

Right.

So just be, just being aware of the fact that you know often times families just don’t have the vocabulary for these sorts of things.