Thoughts Inside of My.... Mind?

Positivity

WARNING: this is the short stuff of my fight with depression- although it's the least detailed. The goal here is to show how much I've changed, and what I did to change how I dealt with it. So it's not bad, but there are mentions of self harm and suicide.

It's no secret that I deal with depression, but what you might not know is that I somehow managed to get out/rid/ignore the completely and utterly worst parts of it. Well, not completely ignore as it still bothers me some times, but what I mean is.... let me paint a picture.

8th grade. This is when my depression started getting me and I started self harming. I didn't like it, at all. And at the end of 8th grade I knew I had to do something, and as land as this sounds, I found that escape through positive quotes. Yeah- the really stupid ones like "believe in yourself." I forced myself to read a few before I went to bed every night, and positivity became my life style.  Maybe even too much of my lifestyle, as I was overwhelming my friends and considered any feeling that wasn't happy to be a failure. I think I maybe over-positivity-ized it.

Freshman year. It hit me hard again, I thought I had gotten out of it, but school triggered me somehow. I hated what I did to myself, and I couldn't get the positive quotes to work like I wanted, and I felt that I was lost forever. I ended up telling my parents and going to counseling, but that didn't work really well, other than having to find ways around them to harm myself. But I knew I could be happy, and I wanted to be. So, I made myself pick out one good thing about the day every night before I went to bed. And that, the number went up and up and up after a while, and it was easier to be positive for me.

Sophomore year. This year, I was happy. I was. I was very happy. Until around January, and then I started falling apart again. But, I didn't want to be happy. Yeah- I didn't want to. So I didn't try to get out of it, and the only thing that shook me out of it was... it was the two suicides at my school. I saw what that did to the people around me, and to me, and I... I couldn't. I had been insanely bad before them, but after that, it was like a switch had flipped. So there's no help here- but I could say continue to require yourself to do positive things until it becomes easier to naturally spot them.

This year- junior year. My depression generally is the worst around September and then January-June, I'm pretty sure it's seasonal. But, it's no longer a constant thing. Before now, it's always been constant, and although it's let up every now and then, or the ability to be more positive is natural to me, it didn't go away, ever. It was always there. But now, after a few years I can see that those things worked. I WANTED to be happy and to feel better, and so I made it a goal. I forced myself to find motivation to be happy from those quotes, the ones I really liked, and goo find a good thing in each day. Now positivity is just my nature I think, I'm an optimist, and I decided I wanted to be one a while ago. I can find the good in anything without even trying, and my depression is no longer a constant, although it does come back every now and then. I know how to pull through those times and work to be happy, and I'm also happy by just being content. If I'm not feeling down, I consider myself happy now.

Throughout my years, I forced positivity into myself, and now it's just nature to me. It's a self-learned trait, that is insanely useful. No- it doesn't work 100% of the time, but I'm no longer depressed 100% of the time either.  And that's a win.

So I don't know if this is helpful or not, but it's what I can say, and if someone else decides to try forcing positivity on themselves, and it works, then I'm happy

9:44 am 12/3/16