How it Feels to Lose Yourself
Depression is something that runs rampant within my generation. I can’t think of a single person my age that I’ve met that hasn’t stated how they sometimes just get sad or feel anxiety. I’m no exception, I just don’t feel like my pain is as significant as others. Or at least I did. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t have anything to be particularly sad about.
When I was a kid, I was a lot like most children my age who were raised well and by loving parents; happy, content. I was a bit more well put together than most of my peers in fact. I knew what I wanted to be since I was 11. Despite not enjoying the middle school experience, I made it through without a scratch, and I went on to enjoy my first year of high school. People kept telling me things were going to get harder, and I believed them, but with every step I took things still seemed to be just as easy as they were when I was in first grade. It wasn’t until I was nearing 16 when things finally began to turn for the worse.
Depression and anxiety often seem to go hand in hand. Anxiety is a symptom of depression. The stress one feels while suffering from high anxiety only serves to bolster their depressive state. Why even bother doing anything stressful, when you can simply avoid stress altogether by doing nothing? It seems to be why people go into a borderline vegetative state. Things that cause anxiety are rather varied; assignments, projects, planning events, or even relationships of any kind. Things that once brought you joy could come to cause you nothing but anguish.
I don’t remember anything vividly from homecoming week that year. I just remember key events; the girl I liked already had a date for the homecoming dance, I lost the first chair bassoon position to a worse player because I simply bombed my audition, and one person in my Latin 2 class that was a borderline nihilist. He probably had the worst effect on me, making it hard to get by all these things that would normally roll right off my shoulders. Despite the bad, I tried to smile, work through the negatives and see the positives. But then, I just woke up one morning and decided “today’s already going to be bad, I might as well act like it”. That was the day I began hurting inside.
My emotional armor of positivity and happiness had finally begun to crack under the pressure. Not that everything hadn’t worked out for me before, but never so much all at once. I went through the day with an angry glare on my face. The joy of others only made me angrier. The pep rally we were all forced to go to only made it worse. And it got even worse when someone hit me in the back with a half full bottle of water. My enraged outburst didn’t stop whoever had thrown it from continuing to throw things. I had to sit back down because I knew if I went up the bleachers to find out who had done it, I would get in trouble for beating them senseless.
Some of my friends tried to help cheer me up after school. I was in marching band, so I had to stay for the football that night. We walked to the shopping center near our school to get food, chatted and hung out. I finally started to feel better, like my old self. Then we played at the game’s halftime show. I was in the pit, playing the glockenspiel in front of the actual marchers with the other large instruments that couldn’t be walked around with. And then, we began to move our equipment back to the band room. That’s when I saw her, the girl I liked. I had seen her earlier of course, she was on the dance team and had performed right before us, but as I walked by her, she didn’t see me. When I got back into the band room, I had a nervous breakdown.
Things were never the same for me after that. It was almost as if I had become more aware. People that I called my friends, I didn’t feel comfortable around them anymore, even though I constantly looked for their approval. I could still feel the bond of friendship, even with those who enjoyed my company, but it was a loose one at best, proven true when contact with a majority of my friends from high school all but ceased. It’s true, I could’ve texted them myself, but the same is true for them as well.
My greatest fear became going to the town center and seeing all the people I considered my friends having a fun time, having not even told me that they were planning to get together. One of the most painful things that had ever happened to me occurred shortly after I had graduated high school. I had thought I had made friends with a group of people in my English class. We sat together, talked, played cards near the end of the year. I enjoyed their company, and I thought they enjoyed mine. Then one day, I was looking through my SnapChat stories, and I saw on one of them that all five of them had gathered and taken a group photo. I had all of their phone numbers, we had even had a group text, yet I was still left out. My fear had come true.
I began to stop seeking friendship, even though I craved it. Not the kind of friendship where you just hang out because they’re an “alright dude”, the kind where your affection for one another is mutual, unconditional, like a family member. Where you don’t need to say, “I love you”, but you know they won’t just abandon you.
We don’t get enough sleep either, going to bed as late as 4:00 am and having our first classes no later than 10:00. From what I’ve heard, a lack of sleep is a contributor to depression. It might be why depressed people sleep all the time. My sister spends most of her time in bed. It’s a vicious cycle. We don’t get enough sleep, so we feel bad, then, because our sleep schedules have become so screwed up, we can’t even try to fall asleep until the late times we’re so desperately trying to avoid. It doesn’t help that the heavy assignment load (for some college students at least), often forces us to stay awake late into the night.
I’m better than most, but I’ve realized how going to bed after midnight slowly went from something I only did on New Year’s Eve to something that happens every night, at later and later times. I don’t get out of bed until after noon, and because it’s so much later in the day I don’t want to do anything, and I waste my time. Some of my friends are much worse. My former roommate couldn’t fall asleep until after 4:00 am. My sister has a different problem; she just wants to sleep all the time.
Ever since entering college, my pain has only gotten worse, although I’ve gotten better at hiding it. I learned that my “condition”, wasn’t unique to me, so I thought my own pain was lesser. Those who had actually been diagnosed with depression, needed medication, saw therapists regularly, they were the ones that truly needed help. I only tried to cut myself one time, and it didn’t even work. Even when I was upset, and someone asked me what was wrong, I would just smile back and say, “I’m fine”, even though whatever was irking me in that instance I desperately wanted to talk about. I thought that them just taking notice was enough to sate me. It wasn’t.
It took me some time, so much trial and error, the removal of the toxicity from my life, and I believe that I finally found the people that I truly consider good friends, people that I love and that love me in return. I hold onto them, I want them to stay with me, because I’m afraid that if I let go, I’ll never hear from them again.
The problem is that the issue isn’t treated as an issue. Older generations call us “snowflakes”, that we haven’t had to work hard enough. But the problem is that we do work hard. It’s the hard work that’s killing us. More and more people are diagnosed with depression every day, and plenty of others are going undiagnosed. People aren’t willing to help us, but sometimes we aren’t willing to help ourselves either. We think our problems don’t matter, that they’re minor in comparison to others that are suffering, and sometimes we don’t think that we’re suffering at all. It happens gradually over time, slowly, as the pain starts to creep in, and then, before you know it, you’ve lost yourself.
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