I guess I like, I. Something I think about a lot if terms of depression is, and something I wonder, is, like, how much is me and how much is the depression. So how much of me is just my personality and things I learned and the things that I was conditioned to do or genetically inclined to do. How much of that is me and how much of that was influenced and conditioned by this disease. And I think just something that I sort of have to tell myself every day is just not to identify with depression, with anxiety, with self-injury, because I think that’s just that’s a really dangerous road to go down when you say I, not only I have depression or I have anxiety, but I am depression, I am anxiety. So, I think just something I would want to share is that I think people should remember to keep themselves separate because that’s your first line of defense is to know where you start, where yourself starts, and where you stop where the thing you care about stop and where your depression is, because that way if it’s not an integral part of you, it’s easier to fight.

I’ve often struggled with knowing who I am in relation to that. I feel like the person that I was then is absolutely nowhere near who I am now. And sometimes I even look back and I can’t believe that that’s been my life just because it’s so drastically different than where I am today. that I don’t really know if I feel like I’ll be known better or understood better because I feel like I don’t even really want to know who that person was, I dealt with it, I went through it and I kind of just wanted it to stay in the past sometimes

I don’t feel like it has made me who I am it has definitely contributed greatly to who I am, it has made me thankful, it has made me proud and I feel very accomplished having gone through something as life threatening as that and making it to now but yeah I definitely go back and forth with that because she feels so different than who she is now.

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.

But I think that it’s very difficult to reduce people to one aspect of their identity and I see that a lot with identity politics like, Oh look gay people. As if that’s suddenly the most important thing about them is who they do or do not want to love or have sex with and I think that being able to be like, Oh this person is gay and they love guns and country music, is, is a thing. There are gay people who love music, you know, there are nuns who are pro-abortion, you know what I mean. Many people live in this grey area and I think that being able to not pigeon hole yourself into any one identity so you don’t have to be like, Oh I am a depressed person. Or like, Oh this is an autistic person. Or, Oh this. You know, I think that, that’s unfair and I think that denies you, your the totality of your humanity.

that’s something that I manage. It varies. About a year ago, it was something that walked with me, you know, I woke up with it, it colored every thought I have. There have been times when it’s been really bad and it felt kind of hopeless. But what I’ve learned when I was young in my first depressed– my first suicidal depressive episode at 10 years old, is that periods of hopelessness are temporary. And that if you wait them out, you normally see a solution that you haven’t thought of before. So sometimes, it is that. Other times, it’s– you know what, things are really good right now. And things are going really good for me, I feel optimistic about the future, but there are still even today, there are certain days where like, I know that things are good but I’m just tired, I’m just sad, I just feel a little awkward. It’s something that you live with. It’s something that you make adjustments to, you know, it’s — I’ve tried to think of it as like, you know, having like a sore shoulder or something. You want to be careful with heavy– lifting heavy objects. You don’t want to hurt yourself but it’s an annoyance, it’s not something that’s taking you out of the game. And that’s what I’m trying to remind myself is that no matter, no matter how bad I feel, it’s almost never actually that bad and if I just keep on doing what I’m doing that I normally turn out OK.

It’s funny because they represent me so much in a certain way. Walter always wants to be pet, petted and he always wants you to give him all the pets and he’s super outgoing and super loving. He’ll just sit on someone’s lap, like brand new person, never been in the house before. He’ll just sit on their lap and get hair everywhere all over them, you know. He loves it. Richard is more standoffish. He doesn’t like being picked up. He’s not the friendliest cat. He’ll let you pet him if he feels like it. So it’s funny because I think they’re both like parts of me. They both, they both reflect parts of my personality which is really cute, I feel. Because Walter always wants attention and I’m super outgoing and I always want to make new friends, and then parts of me are like, when I get depressed or when I’m like feeling anxious, I’m like I don’t want to talk to anyone right now, like. I just want to do my own thing, you know, put my headphones in and zone out, you know, like. It’s like cats.

So it’s definitely, a struggle. And I feel like eventually my physical body and you know what’s in here kinda separate themselves and you know my brain will be like, I do not wanna get up and my body will be like, well too bad like you know, it’s kind of just like this instinctual survival thing and that I feel like kicks in when your brain just wants to give up but your body is like, well we can’t, we must keep going and you know, there’s so much to do learn and to, to perceive and even though this sucks like it can get better, it may go back to sucking [laughs] but like there needs to be that balance and I do recognize that you know the universe kind of flips flops between negative events and positive ones .

I like don’t want to be having sex I don’t want to be having, you know? But also I don’t want to be not doing things that I would otherwise enjoy and I might actually enjoy once I began because of depression and that makes that very difficult to-to navigate for me. especially because I don’t know if it’s decent at least it requires you, sex to be like present in your body a certain amount which can be hard and scary for me in times of depression because like, things can feel really scary if I’m present in my body and things can feel like too much [inaudible] you know? And so it’s just a whole fuckin’ mess. Sucks [laughs].

And so drained mornings, going through school and you know having this other side of me come out I, it brought up kind of a dual personality because you know around people I knew that you know I can’t act how I would if I was alone myself in my room. Or with no one around not even my parents and so everyone, if they were to describe me they would describe me as an extroverted person, as someone who is very excited about life, ebullient and very intelligent and what not but deep down inside, I knew you know, Only if you understood how I feel the minute you walk out of this room or walk out of this interaction with me. And so I had to navigate those two personalities, it was, I felt often times I did feel unfocused in school just because my default train of thought is you know, Why are you here? Why are you alive? What’s happening to you? Why can’t you appreciate life as other people can? This is all just pulling to the fact that you shouldn’t be here, you should do something about that. And so that train of thought kept going in the background so I had to find ways to distract myself and what distracted me was my school work. And so I carried through and I ended up doing well in school simply because I was so desperate to avoid that underlying train of thought. But in that, but what that caused is the cycles of depression because as I was on my high of being able to just you know focus on everything and you know just do all of my school work, I was able to ignore the underlying issues that I was having and all the thoughts that were jumbled up in my mind. So that’s how high school was for me.