Growing from depression.

Part 1

As a teenager and through my early twenties until now, depression was a constant, though cyclic, part of my life. Still, as a teenager, I didn’t quite realize how, by being ignorant about which habits and behavior patterns triggered depressive stages, this would affect me greatly in adult life.

It all started when I was thirteen and I spent almost two years with a chronic gastritis that would make me vomit every two days. Soon, my mother and I found out that this was some kind of unconscious nervous manifestation, which I knew not how to control. By then, I couldn’t understand how can one be unwittingly nervous. From biting my nails, to playing with my hair and having bulimic outbreaks, I had it all.

I grew up from a highly gifted kid to become a frustrated teenager who would later evolve into an insecure young adult. This wasn’t quite clear to me until, last year, pretty close to my 25th birthday, I had my first anxiety crisis (followed by two more in the next couple of weeks) that would culminate in one life changing journey through depression for more than one year. I remember, as if it was today, feeling lost in one of Lisbon’s main squares and crying because I couldn’t decide if I should take the bus or the subway, as if my survival depended on that.

By then, I had been given quite a few extra responsibilities at work (aka, I got promoted) I was having problems with some of my colleagues (aka, I had to manage a team) I had broken up with my 4 year boyfriend and my love life was a mess. My body warned me many times before that something wasn’t right since I spent the three months before, cleaning cold sweating hands with toilet paper that I would bring to my desk in the morning, so I could type. I had moved into a new house in a great location and I had managed to entirely furnish it. And, I was miserable.

I realized that I was in deep shit when, for many weeks in a row, I woke up every morning thinking: you’re a failure and everyone can see it.

The point is: being depressed helped me grow. Of course overthinking,procrastinating, being highly unmotivated, crying every morning with no apparent reason, suffering from physical pain and, ultimately, not being able to get out of bed and spending weekends in my pyjamas was a living hell. A real hell. However, and especially overthinking, made me actually think about it.

If you are disorganized, if you don’t like planning and prefer to live accordingly to whatever direction the wind blows and, still, you have the ambition to be the best in what you do or feel an inner pressure to succeed, you will probably get depressed at least once in your lifetime.

As I said earlier, I was a highly gifted kid who became a frustrated teen because, putting it in a simple way, things were easy for me. I had no trouble learning and I was a straight A student. Frustration was a constant during my High School years because things weren’t challenging enough. So, I spent three years motivated not to do the best I could, but doing just enough to get through. Planning was not in my vocabulary, dedication seem worthless and things were fine the way they were.

In college, however, things became more complicated and even more when I started working. The world is a cruel place full of other people who want to be the best at what they do. People People who lack neither skills nor ambition to succeed. Things get serious here, this is no longer High School.

Of course determination will only play its part if you’re willing to plan your moves (and stick to it). Otherwise, you will impersonate a big fat bull ramming a wall and you won’t realize (neither accept) why things do not go as you want.

Lack of planning leads to procrastination, which leads to anxiety, which leads to depression which leads to procrastination, which leads to a serious inability for planning.

If you strive for perfection (which doesn’t exist, by the way) you must be willing to work. Hard. Hardwork always beats talent. And I was a very talented teen trusting solely that I could change the switch into hardworking mode whenever I wanted in a fantastic place called future.

Depression does not allow you to see the big picture. Or, in other words, the big picture is a place full of nothing, reduced to negative events, personality faults and zero solutions. Realizing what I needed to do to get out of there and not coming back cost me some friends, time and money. But it also put the emphasis on oriented determination.

There’s this great TED talk from Andrew Solomon on the subject in which he says that ‘the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality.’ And, of course, if you’re suffering from depression right now this may sound quite useless to you. I hope not. I hope that, at least, you find strength to get help and start planning your way out.

(I’ll definitely write more about this further on.)