Standing on a Line
On October 13, 2015, I turned twenty-one years old. The days leading up to that Tuesday should have been exciting and extremely anticipating. This meant I should have looked forward to going to bars, attending 21+ concerts, and not having to ask someone else to buy me drinks. If you knew me well enough, you would know that I am not the type of person to particularly enjoy going out, drinking, or any of the above. Regardless, it was my birthday! I was supposed to be thrilled, but I was not.
As a young, joyful child, I made countdowns for practically anything. I not only created them for my birthday, but for my brother’s, and also my friends’ birthdays, as well as vacations, holidays... you name it. With a birthday in the middle of autumn, I would plan in August the color frosting and type of cake I wanted for when I brought cupcakes to my classmates. Also in the heat of summer, I still can recall my brother and I, building sand castles on the beach and discussing what we wanted to be for Halloween… nearly two and a half months away. So why was it that I never looked forward to anything anymore?
When I fell on the playground in grade school, the burning sensation of blood pooling through the rips in my navy, blue tights, a Band-Aid placed on my scuffed knee, by the affectionate school nurse, was a simple fix. When cruel girls bullied me in the sixth grade for being chubby, a big hug from mom and bowl of ice cream was the perfect solution to my tears that stained my uniform blouse every single day. Yet, those sweet resolutions are barely even quite close to solving my clinical depression.
At age five, my parents split up. At age fourteen, I starved myself in the summer. At age fifteen, my dad was arrested for driving drunk. At age sixteen, I purposefully made myself throw up after the small amounts of healthy food I ate. At age seventeen, the boy I dated cheated on me and continued to emotionally hurt me until college. At age nineteen, I experienced the worst heartbreak imaginable from the boy I was in love with. Two years later, I would have the biggest and most important birthday of them all, but I did not care. When I told my friends “It’s just another day,” they were dumbfounded, except for my best friend. She knew the cold cave I live in inside my brain.
I thought hardships were just part of life. As a kid, I yearned to grow up. I wanted to be in high school. I wanted to meet a bunch of friends. I wanted to meet boys. I wanted to be beautiful. Looking back now, those were the easy days. However, I thought those traumatic days were just a one-time thing. I never imagined I would continue to struggle with it. I thought that I just had to mature, put on a brave smile, and forget about the hurt… except it followed me. It was not like a shadow you could visibly see on a sunny, seventy-degree day; sometimes, it was worse on the overcast days when everything is blurry and you cannot determine where your shadow is. Unfortunately, those overcast days got the best of me and demon inside came out of hiding.
I tried to explain to my mom and stepdad how I felt out-of-place everyday, one particular night. I thought this, what I intended to be simple, explanation to be short and quick, especially since we were out-to-eat with my stepdad. I thought moms had the correct answer for everything; however, I learned that the hard way. In the heat of the summer in 2014, mid-rationalization of my depressive, lonely feelings, she did not understand. I understand that not many mothers want to accept the fact that their child is unhappy, but she was delusional. I lost my mind, especially my temper, mid-meal. I had the worst mental breakdown ever.
After this dramatic wake-up call, I knew I had to stand up for myself. If I cannot take care of myself, how could I expect to take care of my friends, family, or a family of my own in the future? Only a few days later, I found myself being questioned, “I need you to describe to me how you feel” by my therapist. In general, I am fairly quiet; I like to keep to myself and mind my own business, even more so when meeting someone new. However, I was not timid that day; I must have gone off on a tangent, while hysterical.
Not enough people are able to comprehend that depression is a true, mental disease. It is not something a person can control intentionally. Depression lives inside of a body that fights to survive inside of a slowly collapsing, withering mind. The biggest misconception is the difference between feeling depressed and having depression. Learning I had depression was confusing to say the least. All along, it had felt as if I had lost something and could not remember where or when I last had it. Several years later, I came to the realization that I did not lose something; I had lost someone, and that someone was myself.
I knew I had to be careful of how I speak and act because there is something so extremely self-destructive within me. It is difficult to explain what I am thinking or feeling because most of the time, I do not even understand it myself. Many of my friends ache for the reunion with their beds after classes or practice. But for me, sleep is not sleep anymore; it is an escape. Even after a replenishing eight-hour sleep, I wake up exhausted. These are the worst days because not even a large, hot, hazelnut coffee with skim milk is able to cure my drowsy eyes with the bruise-like bags underneath to match.
Depression is like a drunken man leaving the bar on a Saturday night. It is clumsy and humiliating. It crashes around, tumbles over, and knocks into things that have done no harm. When you bump into something, usually you apologize. Depression does not feel sorrow; it only brings it. It is an unwanted gift that you have to keep, kind of like that ugly sweater your grandmother knitted you for Christmas. There is no choice. It sits upstairs folded up in the back of your dresser drawer, or mind, and you know you will never be able to get rid of it.
I feel as though I am fighting a constant battle between wanting to be alone and not wanting to feel lonely. In this battle against depression, I am the only soldier for the team of the “good guys”, and everyone and everything under the sun joined the team of terrors and monsters against me. It was like these fiends would strangle me in my sleep and jump on my lungs not allowing me to breathe. I knew this was not the reason for my asthma; that was exercise-induced. This was anxiety. Anxiety can be looked at as the evil sidekick to depression. Anxiety was the villain that pinched my diaphragm so that I drowned in the oxygen-rich air that is supposed to keep me alive. I find it humorous myself when I defend the war I fight inside my head every day with, “I’m fine, just tired is all.”
Maybe this was why I always feared that my mom would never return from running errands when I was only five-years-old. I was so used to infrequent visits from my dad that I convinced myself she would fall into the same routine. Maybe this was why my family could see my protruding cheekbones, ribs, and collarbones when I was fourteen-years-old. I felt powerful by controlling my meals and growing fond of my growling stomach putting myself to sleep. Maybe this was why I noticed a small, popped blood vessel in my eye after nightly sessions of purging after dinner at sixteen-years-old. No one knew of these bulimic behaviors until one year later when my mom had snuck up the stairs and waited for me on the other side of the door. Maybe this was why I am still bitter years after two major heartbreaks. Due to living in the past, I refuse to believe that I probably will meet someone new and better in the near future, because I am not familiar of real happiness. Maybe this is why I sometimes find myself showering not because I am smelly and dirty after cross-country practices, but because I need to cover up my crying. I struggle to distinguish the water trailing to the drain as my tears or the water from the shower head. I do not think anyone could ever criticize me more severely than the way I viciously criticize myself. It is extremely, painfully difficult to love myself. My mom has always told and continues to tell me, “You can’t expect anyone else to love you if you can’t love yourself first.” Hearing that throughout my teenage years makes it easier to cope with the fact that I still struggle, knowing I have a support base behind me.
With depression, it is difficult to find beauty and enjoyment on a day-to-day basis. Yet, I found a passion. I try to look at being called fat and ugly at such a young age as the bullies adding fuel to my fire; they made me the strong runner I am today. Though my body image lives at an all time low, my desire for racing never dies. Whenever I lace up my Asics, get location on my Garmin watch, and take my first three strides, I forget everything. These are the few moments when I am able to run away from the negativity that inhabits my mind. I do not forget how to fluctuate my pace, begin my kick, or conquer the hills of 5K and 6K courses; the only thing I forget is how I felt before I started. Once a week, in the cross-country or track season, I find myself trembling with nervous shivers in the tiny runner’s box behind the white, awful smelling spray painted starting line on a crisp, autumn Saturday morning. Yet, on the other remaining six days of the week, I find myself standing on a line between giving up and seeing how much more I can take. However, those awful feelings are outranked by moments like the runner’s high I felt at mile eight and the ecstasy I experienced for the next five miles during my half-marathon last year.
Despite the few, amazing moments I experience, I still experience the daily torture of depression. Just like when my friends wondered why I was not excited to turn twenty-one, I cannot piece together an answer when asked, “What’s wrong?” by those I love the most. I cannot justify in a few words that everything in my world is spinning like a tornado that effortlessly snatches everything in sight in its path and continues on, never seeming to stop. It keeps going and it will not end. I cannot even hide; at this time and point, I do not even try. Hiding out of sight can only do so much, until I find myself in a demolished room with a roof that has been ripped off and propelled away. I cannot explain this to any person in a fathomable way. The eyes that roam to the floor and the deceitful smile that whispers, “Nothing, I’m okay” is what I consider to be a good day.
