In my junior year of high school, I challenged the idea that I was trapped with my diagnosis of depression. My own heartbreak caused me to muster the courage I required to challenge my despair. I was exhausted of feeling like my emotions were not my own to command, and this ultimately prompted me to act.
Depression found me when my life began to unravel during my freshman year of high school. My father, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease five years previously to my coupling with mental illness, seemingly morphed into a different person overnight. This man who was formerly charismatic and loving, became a snarling monster who, without rational explanation, began to resent his life at home, including his wife and children. He was able to maintain the facade of charisma and wholesomeness around doting friends and extended family members, while simultaneously ruining the lives of his immediate family without remorse or care.
He harshly erased and rewrote my family’s history, demoting us from the source of his happiness to an albatross preventing him from it. He abandoned us in search of validation and found solace in a woman who, at the time, was a trusted family friend. From this point in time onward, sadness and I became inseparable.
In the span of eighteen months, I flitted in and out psychiatric hospitals and emergency rooms for suicide on four separate occasions, dabbled in numerous medications for depression and anxiety, and celebrated my seventeenth birthday in the walls of a hospital with my fellow patients, instead of with friends and family. Though I would fight my hardest during the interim between hospital stays to be healthy, I eventually disintegrated, and the progress I had made with therapy and medication would fray away until I was pleading to be taken somewhere before I harmed myself.
However, it was not that I actually wanted to die. In my mind, death was the ultimate antidepressant: depression would no longer have its talons in me if death took my out of its grip.
During this time, my identity was atomized. In my pre-depressive life, I was a dedicated student who strived to be excellent and took pride in her work; in my depressive life, I completed sub-par work and was behind in every subject. I felt no need to engage in social activities, and quickly forgone everything that had defined me before. No longer was I the caring, creative friend who loved to bake, read, and write. Even though I fought to remain alive, I was no longer living. I existed in a haze of apathy.
After my third hospital stay and two years of witnessing my father’s unbridled mania, he received a new diagnosis of Dopamine Dysregulation Syndrome (DDS), a rare and complicated side-effect of a medication used to treat Parkinson’s disease. DDS mimics the symptoms of psychosis and the manic stages of a Bipolar disorder. His devastating behaviors were accredited to the syndrome, though it left me with no closure.
A few short months later, I learned of my father’s infidelity, which he consistently lied about during hospital-ordered family therapy. Albeit, this blow caused me to reach the conclusion that I no longer wanted my emotions to rely on the actions of other people. All this time, I was letting my emotions sabotage my life. I vowed to never be the victim of anyone.
I began to make myself whole again. Attending school was no longer something I had to drag myself to do. My schoolwork restored to its original caliber. I began focusing on the ways my life could begin. I fought tooth and nail to resurrect the ambitious, whole person I currently am now. Even my teachers noticed my drastic change from struggling to successful. If I realized sooner that I had the ability to save myself from a life of monotonous misery, I would have certainly challenged my idea that I was eternally doomed to depression at an earlier time.
The moral of my story is not that you can just choose to fix your depression. Even though I am more stable than I have been in years, I still have my struggles and bad days. However, I have made the conscious decision that I am worth the effort of recovery. And I promise that you are too.
