An Open Letter to My Younger Self: My Battle With Depression

Dear 18-year old Brandon,

You’re about to go through a decade of struggle, both mentally and physically. The journey ahead of you will not be easy, it’ll test you in ways that you never thought possible. You’ll be tested on multiple accounts — how you feel about yourself, how guarded you are with others, how you handle friendships and relationships, and how it’ll change your professional mindset.

Depression will become an overwhelming aspect of your life. It will consume a vast majority of your thinking, how you approach simple tasks like just getting out bed. “Will today be a day that I have the willpower to get out of bed?” will be a question that you will ask yourself daily for months and years on end. You’ll start to know before you go to bed on how successful of a day you’ll have, the answer to this will either positively or negatively impact your sleep.

Did I forget to mention that you’re going to battle this alone for the better part of the next 10 years?

You’re going to be stubborn.
You’re going to be nervous.
You’re going to be afraid.
You’re going to feel so many feelings.

The end result will leave you too scared to let anyone else in on this journey. You’ll battle each and every emotion under the shroud of smiles, happiness and confidence. Your poker face could win World Championships of Poker (if you actually understood the full rules). Each time someone gets close to the real you, and you actually realize they are breaking through a wall, you buckle down even harder and build an even bigger wall.

You’ll pretend even more. Each movement and thing you say will be calculated as to not spill a single secret of the internal war you are fighting with yourself. You’ll have tons of friends, at times more than you can mentally handle due to how you feel about yourself, but everyone will comment that you are one of the nicest, happiest, and confident guys they’ve ever met. Success, you did it! You’ve fooled one person after another person.

The people closest to you, you’ll push even harder on them because they know you better than everyone else. You’ll make sure they can’t see through that wall, at times, you’ll be a complete asshole to them in order to back them off from you. People getting close to you is the worst thing that could happen, at least that is what you’ll think. When in reality that is exactly what you need.

You’ll make it through your Senior year of High School without any issues, it was a breeze to get through without having any real problems. This will lead you to think that there is nothing to really worry about, yeah you will feel like crap here and there, but you will make it through pretty effortlessly. Turns out, this was only due to the regimented aspect of your life at the time and an overall lack of mental maturity. You haven’t really experienced many emotions to this point in your life. Having never missed a day of school, there will be no time to start now. You have to prove to your parents that you can be perfect, can’t go this far and be a screw up.

You will be a top competitor in Cross Country and Track & Field, it fuels your feeling of “being confident” and “being perfect”. Going out for a run by yourself will be a pain reliever. You can punish yourself while running. It will be nice to feel the pain in your muscles, because during that time, your brain focuses only on that pain and not the disaster that will be going on in your mind. It becomes an obsession to feel the hurting and burning sensation because you feel normal for those few brief periods of time. It will work in your favor, you will excel. You will set PR after PR, this whole depression thing can’t be so bad after all, look what it’s doing for your running?!?! You will be so wrong.

Fast forward to the start of college. This is where you will begin to find out it was purely due to the structure of being in High School. Your life will be turned upside down. You’ll pretend to find comfort in drinking, this will lead to some issues with campus security and you’ll get an ambulance called on you. Does it stop you? Nope, you will just make sure you have others around you that keep you in check when drinking. No matter how many bottles you reach, you’ll never find the answer you are looking for. It will take a lot of bottles to find the answer, but college will be a perfect disguise for looking for answers inside a bottle, after all everyone in college is reckless. You will easily be able to play it off as “I’m just having fun and in college, I don’t have a problem.”

You will make it through your Freshmen Year and feel like a disappointment at the end of it. You were a good runner in High School, but you will not live up to the expectations that you set for yourself. This will haunt you. How could this be? Running was the one consistent in your life.

At the beginning of your Sophomore year you will find lifting, this will completely change your life in ways that you will not know for a couple more years. This will be your new obsession, it fills the same voids that running did when you felt confident in it. Better news though, Brandon, you’ll gain muscle and it’ll give you some boost in your confidence due to a change in your appearance.

Overall, your first semester of your 2nd year will be an incredible challenge, but at the end of that semester, you will find a girl that will change your life forever. Her name? Emily Buckley. She will become your best friend and be the first person you will ever give any hints to about your issues, though she knows more than you will figure out about your issues but never pushes any topic that you are not ready to talk about.

You two will spend pretty much every hour with each other and your friendship will reach a level that you will hope you can have with someone else. The bad news is, she will transfer out of SLU (where you will go to college), but you will still be friends today (see far right picture above, that’s 2016).

The next two years of college will set you up for many years of very severe depression; you will end up hurting your shoulder on December 3rd of 2008. This will sideline you from accomplishing many feats that you wish to accomplish in both running and lifting. The days will become increasingly darker mentally, with very little relief. Each day will become a struggle; most days will feed off each other with the last being worse than the one before it.

This is where you will need to really buckle down and find a deeper meaning in life, in happiness, and why is this happening to me? You’ll still continue to drink like a fish, and no, it will not help solve any issues. Looking back on it though, you will have some pretty interesting stories to tell. Big news, you do manage to survive your 21st birthday, but just barely.

When you search for a deeper meaning, things at first will appear gloomy and apparent, but you will soon realize that no matter how depressed you become your poker face still will rule the day. No one is the wiser, continue on into a lackluster life.

During the summer before your Senior year, you will get a tattoo to help represent these struggles, though you will play it off as just an awesome quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender that is strength.”

It won’t make everything better. You’ll still struggle, but whenever you are having a really tough day this tattoo will be a representation of what you can get through when you buckle down.

Some very gloomy and upsetting days will lead you to some very questionable decisions about life. I will not lie, these days become progressively more cumbersome during your Senior year of college, but you will make it through. Your roommate during your last two years of college does more for you then he will ever know. You’ll owe him big time.

You’ll make it through college and into the real world. If you thought college messed you up, just wait until you make it this far into life. This is when you’ll need to approach someone to get some actual help, but do you? Not until the end of 2014; you’ll have 4 more years of struggling on your own.

You will start a job as a personal trainer, which will become your passion in life. You will go on to be well respected by some of the biggest names in the industry by the age of 28, but you will struggle the first couple years in this career. The struggle will not be because you don’t know the material, but from a lack of confidence in yourself. You’ll need to sell your services for $79-$99 an hour and with a complete lack of confidence in yourself, not your skills, you will lack the ability to properly push the sales side of the business. You’ll read lots of books and will do what you know how to do best, fake it. Eventually you’ll start to come into your own on the business side of things and things get easier.

Your hunger to be one of the best is your new motivation, it replaces running and lifting as that go-to helping hand. You will find peace in your mind while helping others. You will struggle to find a way to help yourself, so helping others will give you that feeling of actually being successful. You’ll be able to make life changing changes for your clients. You will be successful.

The bad news? Until 2015 you’ll ruin many friendships from pushing people away because you’re afraid people will find out your deep dark secret. You would rather lose a friend then admit that you are tainted, flawed, and broken. Nobody needs to know the deep down gloomy Brandon LaVack, so you will make sure that they don’t. Life is all about being happy with perfect everything happening to you. Nothing could possibly be going wrong.

Not only will you ruin friendships, you’ll also ruin relationships. So kudos to never being happy in a relationship. You will not make the realization that you need to be happy with yourself until you have ruined many relationships with both family and girlfriends. You will take each breakup as a personal attack to yourself. You take each breakup personal and always attempt to find more faults in yourself. Each breakup will drive you into hating yourself even more. It will not be until near the end of your most serious relationship to date in late 2014 that you open up about your depression. Your girlfriend of the time figures out that you have issues that you need to address. You push back and refuse to go to therapy, but these conversations will set the stage for you finally getting out of the dark hole you have placed yourself in.

From late 2014 through most of 2015 you will go to therapy 1–3 times a week, and for the first time in a long time, you know what, you actually start to feel normal. You are not perfect. You will still have bad days. You will still beat yourself down, but you actually make changes for the positive in your own life instead of focusing on bettering everyone else’s life.

Therapy will not be easy. You have 8–9 years worth of frustration, destruction, walls, and false thoughts that have piled up inside which start to make their way out in actual words. These words that come out of your mouth during therapy will scare the hell out of you. You are not ready to hear these words, but need to hear these words.

“I have depression. I’m not happy with myself and I don’t think I deserve to be happy.”

After months of therapy, those words will come out of your mouth. It will throw you for a loop. You will know that you had depression for a long time but never admitted it to yourself. This admittance will be the turning stone towards your success.

It turns out that you will not be alone in this journey, it is very common and many others suffer. All of this time you will keep it to yourself out of fear, shame, and being judged negatively. When in reality, most people would have been very accepting and supportive the entire time. You buried these issues so deep for so long, when it could have been resolved quickly. Don’t fear change. The fear of change will haunt you, but change is where things can actually be made.

Fast forward to October 2, 2015, this will be a huge day for you. A bunch of people that mean the world to you will all be out for your birthday in Boston. It will be a great time, far too much drinking and sushi will be had. The best part of this night? You will laugh and smile for the first time in nearly 10 years, three days before your 28th birthday.

Yes, Brandon, you will laugh and smile many times over the last 10 years, but this was the first real laugh or smile that was 100% real. You will laugh or smile because you needed to, but you will laugh for a real reason with a 100% sincerity.

You will find love. You’ll start dating, Lauren, a few days after your 28th birthday. She’ll become your rock to help you through a lot of stress that normally would drive you into a depressive route. She will help you feel like you are finally capable of letting people in instead of pushing them away. She’ll be a huge part of your life.

This journey will challenge you in ways that nothing else will most likely ever challenge you. You’ll be tested, but you know what? You will come out on top. Still today, you’ll have some bad days, but you know that each day will finish. You’ll make it through the day and it won’t have an issue on how you now perceive yourself.

You will have so many great things come your way. You will just need to get out of your own way. Be willing to accept help from others and realize that you’ll make it through the day.

• You will become a two-time trainer of the year.
• You will launch a successful month-to-month online training program, which will make a lot of people better in all aspects of their life.
• You will speak at plenty of seminars.
• You will have the opportunity to work with many colleges as their S&C Consult.
• People from all over the world will read your blog.
• You will become respected by many of the top fitness professionals.

While the journey may be gloomy a majority of the time, there will be lots of amazing things that happen to you. You will need to focus on the good instead of the bad. You will change hundreds of lives in the next 10 years with no end in sight. You will continue to come out with new ideas for helping more people, this is where you will find the most happiness.

You will decide to get a tattoo to represent all that you have been through on this depression journey.

The weights and the running shoes will be your crutch, but they help you through all of the rough days. They are two defining activities that have helped turn you into the man, both professionally and personally that you are today. You will be successful in your career and in your personal life.

You will decide to take advantage of your Psychology degree from undergrad and place a symbol into the tattoo, which is personal to you. When you look at the shoe you see an “N” at quick glance because just about everyone knows that an “N” on the side of the shoe is representative of the logo for New Balance. People’s perceptions of what they should see dictate most of what we will see at first. This represents that when many people see you smile, they will make the assumption that everything is okay because when you smile you are doing great. That’s what we have been taught, but deep down you could be dealing with an underlying demon and battle with yourself.

I wish you luck on the next 10 years, Brandon. Hang in there, coming out on the other side is the biggest reward ever.

Love,

28-year old Brandon