I’m 21 years old and sometimes my life feels like absolute chaos. Legally, I turned 21 four days ago. Realistically, I feel like I’ve been 30 my whole life.
I don’t live at home with mom and dad anymore, I’ve never been a partier. I didn’t rebel, I never felt the need to. I stayed at home, I read books and I watched tv with my family. I’ll admit that I was a little bit mean to my sister, but not because I needed to be. It was because I didn’t want to look weak.
I have no idea why I felt the need to look strong to my family, but that’s the way I was. Because even my earliest memories I can remember feeling different. I remember feeling depressed before I even hit middle school. Looking back now, I was living a happy life, but not living happily.
“If I was dead, I wouldn’t be going through this.”
The first time I remember thinking this, I was probably 13. I was depressed before, but I always just thought that’s the way it goes. When I first had that thought though, it changed everything. Every time after that, whenever I had that ripping pain in my heart and the walls felt like they were coming down on me, I’d remember:
“If I was dead, I wouldn’t be going through this.”
In a weird, unhealthy way, it helped. I would almost instantly stop crying, but not because it scared me. I would stop crying because I would go into a kind of autopilot. I locked everything inside me and went about life like nothing happened. If anybody asked if I was okay, Yes. I was.
It wasnt technically a lie. At that moment they asked, I was, because in my head it didn’t matter, we all die anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I had happy instances. Moments where I felt free of that dark shadow that wraps itself around my heart and weighs down my head and shoulders. Split instances where I could laugh and be okay. But they were fragments of my life. Like one little ant on one long stretch of sidewalk. Tiny, easily stepped on.
Things got worse and my mind spiraled farther and farther into that shadow where I stored every thought so I could function. But there was too much. The closet in my brain where I kept it all was bursting at the seams. Little things leaking out of the sides like in the cartoons.
The things that leaked out, they just kept oozing like an infected wound. And it was too much. At 16 I broke down and I told my mom I needed help, I couldn’t handle it anymore. She took me to the doctor and that was the first time I started antidepressants.
They didn’t do all that much to help me but I was trying to make it work because I just couldn’t handle the pain in my chest anymore. But I had met my spouse shortly before that and for some reason they never left.
It was like I finally could handle the weight that was pressing on me and holding my head down. I could look up and see the stars in the night sky that my spouse had hung for me. They were pinpricks of light, but so many of them in that darkness.
We got engaged, I finished school, I moved across the country into our home that we bought. We got married and I stopped taking the antidepressants. My spouse was my light and for the first time in my life I was okay.
Three months later things changed. We tried to help somebody and they screwed with my mind. Once again I was in the darkness. And for the first time in a long time I had that thought again.
“If i was dead, I wouldn’t be going through this.”
And for the first time ever, I considered what I could do to make that my reality. And that was the first time I was truly scared of myself. I woke up my spouse and told him the truth and we called a doctor the next day.
I got new antidepressants. I told my mom, she was glad I was trying to take care of myself, but she warned me that the particular ones I was prescribed were known to have some harsh side effects. But they were exactly what I needed.
Without them I feel overwhelmed, like my feelings are too much, like I can’t think straight. With them, I can process and I can organize my feelings.
Due to financial issues I’m not currently on them. But I’m doing better. I haven’t had any suicidal thoughts in a few months because I’m on a good schedule that’s helping me function. This is my life now and I think I’ll stick with it.
Jade Actually 