Before I even knew how to write I made stories. As a child I would lie in bed, sleepless with anxiety, and allow my imagination to wander. My blanket would become a flowing gown, and I would be a princess awaiting my prince. The padding of my cats’ paws down the hall actually belonged to a monster I was waiting to slay. This never truly went away. Even now, on nights when I can’t lie still, I steady my breathing and send myself into a world I created. Only now I can create that world for others as well.
I started writing in the sixth grade; the same year I was diagnosed with depression. Before that, I had only seen writing as something you had to do for school; I couldn’t imagine it could be done for fun. The therapist I was forced to see told me to try keeping a diary as some sort of coping mechanism. I tried it, but I found the events of my own life too mundane to be worth writing down. So I started making up stories. I wrote to escape the scary feelings I was beginning to discover I had. The monsters in my mind became monsters on a page. Especially in early middle school, the vague, indefinable plague of depression was scary because I couldn’t understand it. But the antagonists I wrote were textbook evil, making them much less intimidating. My main characters resembled me; not the person everyone around me saw but the altered version of myself I wished I could be. Beautiful, fearless, strong… everything I wasn’t. This wasn’t a conscious choice; it's only now that I can look back and see how my writing reflected my own life.
I didn’t understand why my writing was full of death and pain. Everything I wrote tended to be on the dark side. I suppose it was enough of an outlet that I didn’t realize that it was I and not my characters who was suffering. These stories were for me only. Peers would ask to see what I was writing in my tattered notebook, but I wouldn’t even give them a description of my tale. I knew something was wrong with the fact that at such a young age I was killing off so many characters, and I was embarrassed to show that part of me. Even my parents, while they knew I enjoyed writing, never read what I wrote. It was my secret obsession.
My depression grew as I got older. But along with it, my love for writing grew as well. My sophomore year was when things started to go downhill. Up until then, I didn’t understand my depression. I still wasn’t aware I was using writing as an escape. Through the rest of high school, my depression got worse and worse. I stopped writing all together. When I did pick it back up again, the happily ever after disappeared. I started writing suicide notes. There was no part of me that actually intended to go through with it, but it made me feel better to get the words on paper, to imagine what would happen if I did. This helped me calm down and think rationally. Things got better before the end of the year, but I didn’t quite get back to normal. I could no longer write.
It was the absence of writing that bothered me the most. I would stare at a blank document for hours until the harsh glow of the computer screen brought tears to my eyes. I had stories in my head, but they were just out of my reach. Try as I might to write them down, I would only get a few sentences before I would look back and hate everything I had just written and delete it. By my senior year I had given up writing all together. Then, that summer I gave up on life. Or at least I tried to. But it wasn’t until after that happened that I had to do the most difficult thing I had ever done. Write my own story.
Once again I was forced to see a therapist. While this second therapist was just as ineffective as the last one, I was once again advised to write things down. To keep a journal and write in it when I felt sad. So I started writing again, but not in a journal. I decided to write my life story; starting from the beginning of high school, with flashbacks to important events in my childhood. I wrote about my struggle with depression as if writing to someone who had been through the same thing. I wrote about the good, the bad, things that were always on my mind, and things I had previously never had words for. Slowly, I found my love for writing again.
Even though in the past my characters tended to represent me, I had previously never dared put my actual experiences on paper. It was such a scary concept, and even worse in practice. I could barely write a page without crying or having a mental breakdown. But once I started, I began to feel better and better. It opened my eyes to things I had never thought about. Previously I had never put much thought into why I was depressed. Sure, I knew it was mostly genetic, but as I wrote I started to realize there were factors in my life that contributed as well. For whatever reason, knowing a cause made my feelings seem reasonable. Having that justification made it so much easier to move on. My whole life I had been ashamed of my depression, so seeing everything it had done to me written out on paper was scary and even a little embarrassing. In high school I told only a few people I was close to about my depression, and none of them knew the full extent of how it affected me. I couldn’t face the world knowing my story because I couldn’t even face it myself. Which was all the more reason to write it.
Today, I barely recognize the girl from that story. That girl certainly would never written this essay, knowing others would read it and only some would understand what she had gone through. When I was younger, people would wonder why I loved reading so much, especially fiction. “It’s not real” they said, “It’s all in your head”. As I got older they said the same about depression. So I write this not in the hopes that I will get you to understand, but because it is the next step in my story. The story that, because of the influence of literacy, will last for a long, long time.
