How Depression Broke Me!

Sitting on my bed as I try to start this story, I’m struggling to decide where to begin and I can feel it coming on. I’ve learned to manage it, to become aware of my symptoms, my triggers, and to remain in control.

I’m Shiv, currently, I am still a student, currently on a period of temporary withdrawal from my studies due to lockdown because of the spread of a deadly virus COVID19.

Depression… just eats you up from the inside out. It’s like a monster inside your head that takes over. Depression is something that shows itself differently for everyone. The worst thing is to know that my family and friends were doing all they could yet I still felt so lonely. Anything that was said to me, I managed to turn into a bad thing. I was literally my own worst enemy. I would come home and feel so exhausted from all of the voices in my head that I would just sleep to block it all out. I didn’t want to wake up because living was a nightmare.

Everybody has bad days but depression can make every day a bad day. I would spend days on end in bed, unwilling, or even unable to move, for depression can be so debilitating that it becomes physically disabling.

I would hardly eat or drink, refuse to socialize, want to escape but not be able to as there was nowhere for me to go, knowing that I would always have to return to my room at the end of the day.

The main two reasons for depression in my life were…

Loneliness & Anxiety:

In some ways, I consider this step one of when my depression spikes because it always seems to come first. In my final year, when my depression reached its peak, I would progressively miss more and more lectures and seminars, leave social outings early or skip them altogether, spend more and more time alone in self-imposed isolation, and tell myself that it was just because I’m ‘tired’. And I was tired, but not for lack of sleep; this was actually a symptom of my depression.

I felt sick with the fear of night time because that’s when the voices got even louder. I would get so frustrated because it seemed impossible to sleep.

I knew I needed help but asking for it just made me feel like a burden. I wanted to be free of meds, doctors, and negative thoughts. I felt as if I had lost myself and wouldn’t ever be the same again. I had no motivation to do anything because I couldn’t see a future for myself. Anxiety caused me to believe everyone was faking their love for me. Try hard and cheer up was the worst thing anyone said to me. Those two words triggered thousands of horrible thoughts and I was beating myself up for not hiding how I felt well enough from everyone around me. I wanted everyone to know how I felt but I didn’t dare tell them. Eventually, I just isolated myself in my room because no contact with people meant nothing could go wrong!

You know that feeling you have in your gut when you are about to and/or really need to cry. While that is what it is like. All the time. I could be laughing and having a great time with my friends, which I often am because my friends are great, and yet in the back of my mind I feel more alone than ever and I just want to curl up into fetal position and cry. But I never can. I can’t go home and cry and then feel better, because it’s not like there is something to cry about, or really anything to be sad about. And it isn’t really sadness. It is complete solitude. It’s when my brain tells me that I am alone, that I can’t be loved, that no one really wants me around, and worst of all that no one will understand me.

That is worst of all because at the place I am in my life, no matter what I have been through in the past, or what my depression tries to make me believe I know that I can be loved, that I’m not alone, and that I am wanted. And I know that because of the hard work I have done to get to that place in my life, and because of some of the amazing people in my life who make sure that I know that they are there for me, that they love me, and that they want to spend time with me.

But the idea that no one will ever truly understand who I am, or any of that. That is a little harder to dissuade me from believing. Because as much as I can tell people what I went, and still go through and what goes through my mind, who can really understand me other than me. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the way my depression tells me it, it is a bad thing.

And Then the Numbness:

I don’t really know how to explain this numbness. It is simply a period of time where I feel literally nothing. I fake happiness/normal emotion around friends, not always very well, and when I am alone I just don’t care about anything.

This is when my grades often fall because I don’t care about anything, including school and college.

And then, sometimes I just want to feel something, anything, and so that is when I think about cutting. I think about cutting because it gives me something to feel, something I can control, but still feel.

The numbness comes because I can’t handle what I’m thinking and feeling because it is too much for me to deal with, so I shut everything off so I don’t have to feel it.

In some ways, cutting transitions me back into feeling. But again, cutting, NOT A SOLUTION, NOT HEALTHY.

And something that I no longer do.

Now, for the past three and a half years, whenever I think of cutting, which I still do. It is still my first thought in either of these situations, I instead do one of the many things that I have come to know to help me cope.

For example, I force myself to spend more time with my friends, because I know that the loneliness will pass and I can talk myself out of feeling lonely when I am not physically alone.

I read/watch anything romantic. I pretend that I am one of the characters, and then I feel what they feel instead of what I am feeling (or preventing myself from feeling).

I play online games just to spend time on it because I know that the loneliness will pass and though my college work does still sometimes fall through the cracks, I always make myself do some work.

Basically, I force myself to live my life, because well, it is my life, and I refuse to live it feeling alone when I’m not, and numb when I could be great.

Because depression is a disease, and I will always have it.

Because my depression is a part of who I am.

And most of all, because I only have one life, and I want to live it, even though when my depression spikes it makes me want to not live sometimes, I refuse.

Because I am the author of my own life and I choose to put a semicolon instead of a period at every point that my depression tells me otherwise.

So that is how my depression affects my life. That is how I deal with it. Like it or not I always will.

If I was to give one piece of advice to others who are struggling, it would be not to suffer in silence. There are people out there who have been through everything that you are experiencing and have come out on the other side. In fact, their experiences have made them who they are today. It may seem impossible to overcome but believe me, you will get there.