Thoughts of a Teenage Girl

Depression

Started 3/23/17
Posted 4/23/17

Alright, so I realize this is very out of order, but I think if you're only gonna read one of the chapters from here, this is the one that you should read. I think it's stuff that everyone should be aware of. Thanks for reading! (edited 5/12/19)

Hey y'all so it's been a while since I've written here, but I've been dealing with a lot lately.

My whole life, I've been the happy one. I'm always smiling, I'm usually the positive person trying to keep everyone else happy. I liked school, I hung out with my friends, I was just a stereotypical white suburban American girl. I'd heard about mental illnesses, how people could suddenly become almost a completely different person. I knew it was a serious issue, but it was like cancer in that, unless you have personal experience with it, it just almost doesn't seem real. And of course, it could never happen to me!

Another thing you have to know about me is that I am good at school. I'm not trying to boast, but I think we all know that school is just easier for some than others, and I've been blessed to have a brain that just works well with the school system. But this isn't necessarily a good thing! Because I've never had to struggle in school, I don't know how to study or manage my time or anything really! I don't know how to ask for help, how to learn new things.

Without going into too much detail, I overwhelmed my brain. I tried to do too much and didn't know how to deal with it when it became too much (as I'd never had that problem before) so to cope with this, my brain just shut down. I shut down. My mom, understandably, got pretty worried and did lots of research and came to the conclusion that I could very well be depressed and eventually, I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) with mixed anxiety. 

Depression is a hard thing to describe especially because no one experiences it the same way. There is NOBODY who knows exactly what you're feeling. People can be as sympathetic as humanly possible and genuinely try to understand but they just can't. Even people who also deal with mental illnesses themselves don't know exactly what you're feeling. And I think that's a really hard concept for people to grasp. This was especially hard in my case because the whole time I was feeling these things I didn't think that they were legitimate. I had friends that I knew dealt with various mental health problems and I'd been "taught" enough about depression to think "that's not what I have. It's not a big deal, I'm just stressed. I'll be fine."

Well, I was wrong... Pretty soon I couldn't do even the smallest of things. The most minor of tasks would paralyze me and I just couldn't deal with the world. I got worse and worse until I honestly didn't want to live anymore. Thankfully, I never got to the point where I thought about actually acting on that, but it was scary. Actually, maybe the scariest part of the whole thing was that it didn't scare me. I would lay in my bed, curled up in the fetal position, all day just wishing that I could go to sleep and never wake up—and it didn't even phase me.

My point is that mental illnesses aren't limited to people who you'd stereotypically think of as depressed. I am the last person you'd ever expect to be depressed. I have a great life with amazing friends and family who love me. I don't deal with a lot of the struggles others do like abuse, divorce, or financial instability. I do really well in school and was very involved in extracurricular activities.

And yet here I am.

Even years after, I have a prescription for antidepressants and anxiety drugs. There are days when I know I'm not going to be able to function as well as I "should." I dropped out of public school during probably the best school year I've ever had because I still wasn't ready to handle it.

At first, I was kind of ashamed of myself. "Why am I feeling like this?? My life is going perfectly what's wrong with me?? I'm just being lazy and dramatic, I'm actually fine" But I've learned that that's a completely wrong way of thinking about it. Depression is not a choice.

Let me repeat that.

Depression is not a choice.

And although it can, it does not necessarily come as a result of your situation. You can have the best life in the world and be depressed. That's not how it works. It is an illness. A disease. You don't choose to get strep or pneumonia, you don't choose to get depression.

I want y'all to get a couple of things out of my story:

The first is that you can throw your depression stereotypes out the window because they don't exist. Depression knows no boundaries and there is no standard set of symptoms or reactions to it. Everyone deals with it so differently that you really can't compare any two different cases expecting them to be the same.

The second is that you never know what someone is going through unless they tell you. Appearances can lie. People don't want the people around them to think anything is wrong with them so they hide it the best they can. To this day, very few of my friends actually know why I missed so much of high school because the only times I actually saw them were days that I felt strong enough to go and do things; nothing seemed wrong then. If my way of coping hadn't been so noticeable to my mom, I probably wouldn't be here able to tell y'all this.

Third, and probably most importantly, mental illnesses are called illnesses for a reason. They are very serious, legitimate medical issues that are not anyone's fault or choice. If you deal with mental health of any kind you should never be ashamed of yourself any more than you would if you had the flu. Nor should you be scared to talk about it. If life is getting hard to handle, talk to someone about it! A parent, a teacher, a friend, heck, talk to me! Simply sharing what you're dealing with can make a world of difference.

Ok well, I'm gonna shut up now. I have absolutely no idea if what I just said makes any sense but I really don't feel like going back and editing. Maybe someday.

Anyways,  tell me your thoughts! Ask questions (even if it's just saying what the heck are you saying here???)

Love ya always,
Ara{H}