In starting up this website, my biggest downfall has been gathering the courage to publish any sort of emotional exposition in undiluted honesty. This, of course, goes against every rule of blogging, including numbers 3, 11, 24, and 26 on what I still consider to be one of the greatest compilations of blogging guidelines to ever be written.
On top of that, I didn’t want this place to be labeled due to a few posts relating to the idea of depression. I pictured myself discovering yet another whiney website, rolling my eyes at lists of complaints and uneducated insight into the disorder, when so many are truly suffering and don’t have the outlet of writing.
I will say that depression is not merely a diagnosis. In its true form, it is not a term that should be tossed around loosely. It needs to be handled as carefully as those it afflicts, who are either so fragile that a single thought can trigger a breakdown, or so heavy with dejection that a world of thoughts cannot move them.
I wasn’t introduced to the idea of it until high school. When my grandmother spent a significant portion of my life tucked away in her queen size bed, I assumed she was tired. She was old, like other grandmas. I came to find out that the better portion of her life was spent that way, always asleep to escape her sadness. When my mother began to spend more and more of her time in a similar situation, I became angry. Why didn’t we shop? Why didn’t we go to movies? Why couldn’t she just take me out like my other friends’ moms?
Around that time, a close friend of mine died in a car crash on his way to a basketball game. My aunt followed a few months later. Two more high school friends, one a teammate, came next. And then my grandmother. By the time my ex-boyfriend committed suicide during the first month of my sophomore year of college, I was so numb to death that his existence fled my mind completely. He was a torn newspaper article. A dried flower.
At the time I was dating a real douche bag. And this douche bag? As grimy a douche as a douche could be. He was so consumed, so tormented by a violent breakup initiated by his rather sluttish ex-girlfriend that a yellow ooze of bitterness seeped from every orifice of his squat, stumpy body. The vagina slowly became the reason for everything wrong in the world. Declining family values? It’s the vagina. Gang violence in Los Angeles? Probably a vagina. The death of Steve Irwin? I’d blame the vagina.
Going back to high school, a teacher noticed some sort of growing despondency and reported me to the guidance counselor. They mentioned a paper I had recently written for my psychology class, which outlined the aspects of depression and suicide among adolescents. I attempted to convince them all that I was interested, not crazy.
My skills in persuasion still suck. Two weeks later, they called in an outside counselor and I was urged to talk to her during my study hall twice a week. The situation was comparable to dragging an atheist to a three-hour-long Sunday mass after discussing the sinfulness of Morgan Freeman for his role in Bruce Almighty.
It was a horrible experience. I sat across from this woman, overweight and terribly frizzy, who talked for no less than 90 minutes about how she improved the lives of her other teenage patients.
Soon after that, I was called back into the guidance office. The counselor proceeded to sit me down and explain the benefits of antidepressants. They are not drugs, he told me. They will not alter Rachel, just balance her out. I was not convinced, nor was I really in need.
Then came college. With the news of the ex-boyfriend’s suicide came a thick emptiness. Rather than any intensified emotion, there was a complete erasing of any strong feelings of any kind for anything. I did not mourn. I was desensitized. There was a transition from not being able to express any feeling to not having any feeling to express.
Was it the boy that caused it all? Absolutely not. It was merely the last event in a series of events that would eventually wear me down.
And then I started to sleep. I would be able to sleep from 12 to 12, attend a class or two (if any at all), and sleep again until later that night. When worry would creep up on me, as it often did, I would sleep to hide from it. I would sleep to avoid organizing thoughts. And I would wake up 14 hours later, exhausted. I saw myself becoming my mother, my grandmother, without even having any real problems to put me in that place.
It was then that I started taking antidepressants. My anxiety melted away, along with the feeling that any of my negative actions would have consequences. Missing two weeks of class? It won’t matter in 10 years. Running up the credit card bill? It’s part of the college experience. Lying about why that paper is two weeks late? Life goes on.
Easygoing isn’t always the best thing. I never touched a drug in my life, yet I felt like a stoner. Nothing could ever be wrong as long as there was life being lived.
I lay in bed three nights ago and tried to think of the last time I cried. I couldn’t remember. I still can’t. The fights with my parents and disappointments that used to send me screaming into a pillow did nothing to me anymore. When I wanted to cry after watching A Walk To Remember, after my sister graduated elementary school, after being in love again, I couldn’t. I was still as numb as before, only slightly more awake.
After that yearlong half-coma, I decided to scrap my orange bottle and see what happened. While I will readily argue in favor of the medication for those who need and are helped by it, it was too much for me. I am untroubled by most things anymore, aside from a GPA which resembles an average college student’s BAC. I am aware enough of what happened to my family members to take the steps to avoid it. The affliction has healed, and even though the scars are still there, I can realize, at least sometimes, that I’m lucky.
