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i’m the youngest in a family of greats. each person in my family, with some members in my extended family, have all accomplished something great.
(for the sake of privacy, i’m not telling what they did.)
but i digress. privacy disregarded, i’m the youngest in a family of greats. i am, some would say, a legacy child. i was when i entered EHS, i am when people recognize who’s related to me. (which, granted, rarely happens, but again – i digress.)
there have always been high hopes. i was raised by two teachers. i’ve grown up in a family where books and the love of reading is abundant. it was expected, and still is expected, that i do my best in school. the benefit i had, however, with two teachers as parents, is that they did not expect good grades. they expected great effort. this is something that i would come to truly appreciate the older i got.
so as i grew up, i internalized these high hopes. i read voraciously. i still do. i have a love of reading that is, unfortunately, very rare in my class cohort from EHS.
and then the Great Childhood Trauma of 2010 happened. i stopped internalizing all these high hopes and started internalizing everything. i shut down. i started binge eating. i stopped singing. i stopped enjoying life and started just aimlessly wandering through it, like a lost traveler in a giant fog bank.
see, there is a misconception about what depression looks like. for people who are not mentally ill, there is this wide-spread misconception that says depressed people cry all the time. they’re sad. they lean on their friends. they sleep a lot. and the worst – it says that depression can be fixed by the love of a man.
(excuse me while i go scream into the void because if i see another ‘oh i have depression oh i found lOVE NOW IM FIXED YAY storyline i will fling myself off into a fiery abyss!!)
to my knowledge, i exhibited none of these symptoms, and yet my psychiatrist told me the other day “yep, Anxiety Girl, you’ve got some #depression to go with that #anxiety!”
author’s note: i am paraphrasing the above statement
hm. interesting. so why did none of the therapists i saw after the Great Childhood Trauma of 2010 point that out? why did none of my high school counselors pull me aside and ask me how i’m doing?
it’s because of the aforementioned misconception about depressed people. i’ve been in communication with both my therapist and my psychiatrist, and they both agree that i have depression and anxiety, and it’s like the what came first? the chicken or the egg? question. most likely, they go hand-in-hand.
so that being said, let me make this explicitly clear: movies and TV shows get more things wrong about depression than they do right. i’m very aware that i’m not the be-all, end-all status quo for depressed people. i know that some of them actually do experience the aforementioned symptoms – crying all the time, hypersomnia, leaning on their friends – it’s just this: i didn’t.
i withdrew. i didn’t make friends easily. in fact, i can only remember two people that i was ever truly friends with from EHS. i started exhibiting many disordered eating habits. i internalized everything i had gone through and pretended i was the quietly smart introvert that i really never was.
i kept it all inside my head until it all broke, and then i would shove it back inside my head until it broke again. healthy, right? (sarcastic)
so all throughout my final two years of high school, save for a precious few moments, i felt like a massive letdown. here i was, the youngest in a family of greats, failing. that had always been my biggest fear, and there it was, apparently coming true. i got into my second choice university and chose not to go. i didn’t get into my dream university. i took a job that i knew would be a bad idea. and to top it all off, all of those supposed ~bad choices~ and things that happened and standards i set upon myself came crashing down about my ears.
i felt like a giant, massive letdown.
so i called my college’s mental health services and made an appointment to go see a therapist.
and slowly, I gained clarity. i realized that i was the only one putting all of these expectations on myself. i realized that all these people in my life who were telling me what to do weren’t actually driving my life.
i’m the only one who can do that.
at risk of sounding like a teenage rebel, there’s nobody that can control me but me.
honestly, that was a pretty radical thought, given the years upon years of crap heaped upon me by EHS.
i just love how it took no less than three massive panic attacks for me to realize i need help, and how it took almost nine months of therapy for me to get to this point. i just love how much EHS fecked me up. (sarcastic)
part two coming in a few days. i’m still working on the whole posting strategy thing. bear with me in that respect, folks.
as always, thoughts welcome.
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collegiate essayist 