The Pursuit of Unhappiness

I was diagnosed with severe clinical depression in the second half of my last year of middle school. To be fair, it wasn’t such a bright idea to write my final will and testament in the middle of my math class, but when you’re in the midst of suicidal despair, you don’t always have the best ideas. My teacher managed to peep what I was writing, and just like that I was sent to a guidance counselor’s office. I don’t remember exactly what she said to my mother on the phone, but the gist was that I was a danger to myself and needed to be hospitalized immediately. My mother, obviously, wasn’t too thrilled to hear that her kid had plans of biting the dust, so when the guidance counselor said it was best for me to be hospitalized, she yelled at me on the entire journey to the hospital.

The topic of depression and other mental illnesses is a taboo in black and brown communities. Mental illness is “white people shit”, as my mother once eloquently called it (forgetting that I am, in fact, mixed white). It was that rhetoric that made me even more depressed, the fact that if I wasn’t visible in my own communities, how could I be visible to my own mother?

A lot of factors contributed to my depression, but let’s start with the fact that the emphasis on college and “a good education” was being pushed onto us eighth graders more and more as our freshman year of high school approached. They wanted us to start picking colleges we were interested in when they hadn’t even ordered our cheap cap and gowns for middle school graduation yet. Being the dramatic child I was, it dawned on me how unprepared I was for high school. As a matter of fact, I was absolutely petrified. Eventually I would learn that I was throwing a huge fit over nothing, but when you’re thirteen years old, everything seems like the end of the world, especially when you were barely passing a majority of your classes.

The second factor was how I tried guilting myself out of depression because I thought I had no reason to be sad. In comparison to my parents, my situation was nothing to really complain about. Did I think I was worthless? Yes. Did I want to end my life? Absolutely. But my parents are both Honduran immigrants who grew up in unimaginable poverty. My father started slaughtering animals at the tender age of six to make a living, and my mother had days where she had to scour through trash cans for food. And me? I’m a whiny city kid with not enough serotonin in my motherfucking head. Does it look like I have anything to bitch about?

Thankfully my father was more understanding and told me it was okay to feel how I felt. My mother, however, told me it was because I didn’t have enough grit and because I wasn’t letting God take care of everything. And even if both of my parents did support me (equally, mind you) during the worst part of my depression, I still would’ve internalized the idea that people have it so much worse than me. Hell, I still find myself ungrateful on days where I don’t want to get out of bed and stare up at the ceiling all day.

What triggered my depressive and suicidal episodes even more was the fact that I was having a sexuality crisis. One minute I was sure I was straight, the next I found myself daydreaming about kissing girls and boys.

Thirteen year old me, suicidal and not sure of my own identity, not sure what I wanted to do with my future, and scared of myself. It was a recipe for disaster. And it was a disaster, considering I was hospitalized during one of the worst snowstorms Boston had ever seen. I stayed in the emergency room for three days because none of the beds at any psychiatric units were open, and I spent two days in the post-surgery unit because the doctors didn’t want me to sleep on the uncomfortable emergency room cots. The most embarrassing part was when I was put on a stretcher and wheeled onto an ambulance, en route to an adolescent psychiatric unit. Thankfully they hadn’t confiscated my phone yet, so I listened to The Black Parade the whole way there to prevent myself from having a meltdown.

The week I spent in that unit in the February of 2013 was the longest and shortest week of my life. I don’t really remember the names of anyone I met in there, but I remember their faces and stories. I remember meeting someone a year younger than me, and I remember the girl with eraser burns all over her arms. There was one kid a few years older than me who was a pothead, another one with frizzy blue hair, and one that stopped his oncoming panic attacks by solving a Rubik’s cube. However, the one that stuck with me the most was one girl who was a regular.

It was her third time in the unit when it was my first.

Sometimes I wonder if she ended up going back after I was discharged, but I’ll never know. I wonder where all of them are now actually, but I’ll probably never know that either.

My rough patch continued throughout my freshman and sophomore year of high school. I got into fights with my mom, my mom got into fights with my dad, and I got into a fight with him before he left for Miami, leaving me with my mother, the person who didn’t (and probably never will) understand me. The winter of my sophomore year was bittersweet, and it was the second time I was serious about taking my own life.

It’s surreal, looking back and realizing how different I was three years ago, remembering how hopeless and sad I was. I mean, I still am sad, but the kind of depressed I was back in 2013… I shouldn’t be alive right now.

What drove me to hold on, what stopped me from downing a whole bottle of pills or throwing myself into oncoming traffic during the lowest point of my depression was hope. No matter how many mornings I woke up crying because I was alive, I always knew deep down something had to fucking give, and life wasn’t as shitty as I thought it was. Beneath all of my anger and pain and resentment and defeat was a fire, and it grew as time passed. It grew as I achieved more and realized that maybe, just maybe I’m not the worst person in the world, and I’m worthy of love and I’m worthy in general.

And now I’m here. It’s the summer before my senior year of high school. My school year ends in May 2017 and I graduate in June 2017. Not bad for someone who was planning on ending their life in February 2013, in my opinion. And years from now, when I write my first book, I can look back and say, “Hey, not bad for someone who wasn’t sure if college was going to work out or not.”

Let’s hope for the best.