The Battle

It’s never easy feeling this way. It’s impossible to even understand it yourself, let alone describe to someone else in hopes that they’ll understand. I’ve recently been questioned one too many times about why I’m “sad.” I received a lecture from one of those grass-is-always-greener people, reminding me that there are people who have it much worse than I do. People are in poverty, they tell me; people are really suffering. Don’t be selfish. Don’t be naive. Don’t be dramatic.

If only you knew.

It started at the age of eight. I felt alone constantly, without ever really being alone. The amount of fear I had about being alone was pretty traumatizing. I felt like I had to give my entire self to people, in order to be loved. If anyone was ever upset with me or needed space from me, my world would spin chaotically; I would panic at the thought of losing them as a friend — as a part of my life completely — because then the empty space I felt would get bigger. I thought about loss and loneliness more than I ever should have, more than really anything else. Remember: I’m just a kid. Loneliness doesn’t even mean anything to me yet. My parents had separated earlier in the year, but they were back together, so I couldn’t really make sense of the feeling (or whatever it was).

Every night, for years, I dreamt about losing my family to tragedies. All different kinds: fires, accidents, home invasions. These were nightmares that haunted me. They were all the same: something would happen to my entire family, but I would be the sole survivor. I would be left alone.

Alone.

The fear of being alone was overwhelming, overpowering. I didn’t understand these nightmares; I couldn’t. I was so young and couldn’t even begin to conceptualize what being alone really meant, because I had never been alone. My parents never even let me watch scary movies, so it wasn’t like I was inadvertently affected by something. It got really bad; if I wasn’t found by my parents screaming out in my sleep or sleep walking in search of my family, I would just go into their room and wake my mom. “I had a bad dream,” I’d cry. I’d never say what it was. It got to the point that my mom told me to stop waking her up, and to just get in her bed. So I obeyed, and suffered silently every single night without understanding what the dreams meant. The only time I ever slept was when I would crawl in bed with my mom, and feel her next to me.

This went on until I was about 12 years old; the last nightmare I vividly remember from this time in my life included my baby brother and sister, who had just been born. With the overwhelming attachment I felt to them as their big sister, watching them slip away in the dream devastated me. I lost everyone in this specific dream, and God talked to me throughout the scenes. He told me it was time for them to go, and that I must go on without them. I begged for them to stay, I told them that I needed them; but it didn’t work. They disappeared, and I️ was left to live alone. I will never forget the pain that I felt, and how I forcefully ripped myself out of that nightmare, screaming out for my family. And then, everything goes blank in my memories; I don’t remember any of those nightmares or that feeling of emptiness from 12 to 16 years old. Part of me believes that it was such a traumatic experience for me that my subconscious has removed the memories in order to protect me.

My memories return right around the age of 16. I started having anxiety attacks without really knowing they were happening. I’d freak out in school, sometimes I’d even pass out from the stress on my body from these strange episodes. I would call my mom to come pick me up early all the time, saying I was sick; but in reality, I felt absent from myself. Totally numb. It hurt without hurting. I had friends, but being around them felt too hard. I couldn’t keep up with their lives, I couldn’t match their vibrance most of the time. I wanted to be a part of everything, but I was overwhelmed by their effortless joy. Life just felt … too hard. Dark. I just couldn’t find that total happiness that I figured I should feel, and I started to think I was different from other people. I felt this giant, vacant space inside of me and didn’t know why, so I went searching for whatever was missing. I became desperate to replace it.

I started obsessing over boys and relationships. I craved affection and attention because I thought that’s what I needed to make me feel less … blank. I put myself in dangerous situations — I’d sneak out and get picked up by older guys to go hang out at their house. I’d walk the streets with friends who encouraged destructive behavior. I did not care why they liked me, I only cared that I wasn’t alone for a little while. This only made me feel worse; I’d feel more emptiness creep in, so I’d search for the new high, the new buzz, the new obsession. I latched on to anyone that filled the void, even if it was only temporary.

I met Joe at 17. He cared about me, and listened when I talked. He didn’t roll his eyes when I cried about something minor and insignificant (which was … all the time). It was life-altering because it was my first love, but also because he was the first one to make me totally forget about that emptiness that had been living inside of me. It was brief, though; about a year into our relationship, I felt it again. The blank space. It was like a hole in myself that I couldn’t locate. I just felt like I was missing parts of myself, and I didn’t know why. I was old enough now to be able to conceptualize the feeling, but I still just could not understand where it came from, or what caused it. It was because that emptiness never really went away, or refilled; I just forgot about it for a while, as I tried to focus on something that I thought was good. I became angry and frustrated; how could I feel so fucking empty when I have someone who loves me? When I have family, friends, Joe, and more? Where is this goddamn hole, and how do I fill it?

This is when I started to ignore it. I pretended it didn’t exist. I stopped telling people I felt weird, or about really anything I was feeling. I never cried in front of anyone anymore — only in private. I found a way to put a mask on and I became the “life of the party.” Everyone told me I was the happiest person they knew. I was voted “most likely to brighten your day” for my senior year of high school, and crowned Prom Queen. I looked like I was so happy and full of life, but beneath the surface, I was completely self-destructing. It felt like a constant hurricane inside of me, destroying everything in its path. I felt everything and nothing at the same time, and I just ignored it. The few times I would burst open from the pressure and cry to my mom, I would be vague and tell her I felt unhappy. She’d tell me to “buck up” and stop being dramatic. I was raised to be appreciative and grateful for everything I had in my life; to always say “thank you” and give to others without expecting anything in return. Understand your blessings, my mother would tell me. Some people would kill to have what you have. She’s right, but she didn’t understand that it wasn’t anything materialistic that I was searching for. Anytime I showed the intensity of what I was feeling — whether I tried to talk about it or I fell apart as a reaction to a fight or little stressors — my parents would call me dramatic. I was branded as over-emotional and hyper-sensitive. Everyone in my family used to mock me whenever I’d cry; they’d call me a “baby” and I’d feel my insides twist with anger and shame and confusion. But it’s not their fault; they didn’t know. They couldn’t have known. They just thought I was being a teenager: entitled and annoying. In reality, I was looking for help.

Still ignoring the warning signs, I left for college. I opted to stay in-state, and everyone thought it was to be closer to Joe; it was really because the idea of being away from home for more than a week at a time was just too much to handle. I lived on campus, and I met so many new people. I was always good at making friends, with an outgoing personality and the ability to draw people in. I went to the gym, I joined intramural sports teams, and did well in my classes. I was thriving, it seemed; even I felt like I had gotten away from the darkness. But then the nightmares returned: the same ones from when I was eight years old. They started as a random occurance, but quickly became frequent. I would wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and crying. Most nights, my subconscious fight or flight mode would have to kick in; my internal warning system would go into such frenzied panic while I was in these nightmares that it would wake me up. They were painful and I was so confused as to why they had returned. I started crying all the time; I didn’t even know why on some days, or where the tears came from, but they always came. I just felt so heavy; I felt so alone at school, despite being roommates with my absolute best friend and having amazing people around me all the time, and I never stayed on campus. I went home every Friday, sometimes on Thursday if my Friday class was cancelled (or I just skipped). Many times, I thought about my life and what it was worth; would people be sad if I was gone? If I died tomorrow, would people miss me? While I never had the actual desire to do anything to harm myself, the thoughts were dark. However, I didn’t ever think that these thoughts were really abnormal or dangerous. I just felt stupid. One time, after a week of nightmares, no sleep, and lots of tears, I told my mom I felt… different. “I think something’s wrong with me,” I remember saying. She laughed, and in a patronizing tone, responded: “What, do you have too much homework?” I never, ever mentioned it again.

It wasn’t her fault. She could have never known. She wouldn’t have even understood if I told her.

In the middle of the year, I went to the counseling center. I couldn’t stand that hole in myself anymore, and I was in search of clarity and help to fill it. I felt completely defeated and exhausted. After a few weeks of seeing a most likely unlicensed social worker who barely even scratched the surface of what I was experiencing, she told me I was dealing with separation anxiety. “It’s normal and very common,” she told me. “It’s your first year away from home, you’re missing everything you’ve always known. It’s just an adjustment period.” She never said anything about depression. She never said any of it was serious. I had been somewhat vague about everything I was experiencing because I was naive enough to think that whatever I told this woman would affect school in some way. What if they deemed me unfit to attend, or live on campus? What if they take my financial aid away? What if they tell my parents? Of course, that would be a breach of confidentiality, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t even know why I was seeking out therapy when I didn’t understand what was going on. I let her convince me that what I was feeling was normal. I believed that many people felt this way, and that I wasn’t the only one. I’m just a giant baby, I thought. I’m homesick. Get over it.

Again, I forced this all to this to the background. I completely ignored it. I muted any pain I felt and pushed on. Fought. One step at a time. This worked for almost four years, until Joe and I broke up. That emptiness I felt broke me down so much that I couldn’t even continue our relationship, because I felt like I wasn’t even present in it. We were both hurting each other so much, in so many different ways. When it was over, I was 22 years old and we had been together for almost six years. We lived together, and had started a life together. The tremendous guilt that I felt for hurting him as much as I did when it ended ate me alive. It shook my entire world, and that hole I felt? It became bigger than me. It consumed me. I spiraled completely out of control; I didn’t return to school for the fall semester. I dropped out of the social work program that I had worked for two years to get into. I didn’t even get out of bed. The emptiness I felt … it took over every single part of me. I WAS the emptiness. I BECAME the emptiness. It became an identity. I wasn’t even me anymore. It hurt so fucking much that I just went totally numb. I forced myself to get up and move on, and shut myself off completely. Autopilot: on. I felt so much pain, but I just muted it every time it tried to swallow me whole.

I made it through three years like that. I numbed myself in every way I could, with the exception of drugs. I looked for anything to feel less alone, just like I had at the age of 16; I gained too much speed for the mental state I was in, unable to keep up with myself. More destructive behavior, more backwards attempts to fill that blank space. And then last June, I had the most terrifying and painful nightmare of them all, about a suicide attempt. I had never had suicidal thoughts before. It was so vivid, and seemed so real. This was my breaking point, at the age of 25; it was my inner self, crying out for help. I did not admit to anyone what I was feeling, out of shame and fear, but I finally sought out professional help. It was the first and the biggest step I had ever taken to really try to fix whatever was wrong.

I started seeing an actual licensed and clinical social worker for weekly intensive individual therapy. He told me, later in the process, what his original perception of me was when I walked in for therapy.

I thought you were fine. In our first ‘get to know you’ session, you told me about your close family, about your love for your career. You seemed very put-together. Healthy. I figured you were coming to see me for some typical stress-related issues, like many other people do. But after a few weeks with you, after getting to dig into all of the things you’ve been burying, I found myself reading my notes on you at home. I realized that you were in one of the deepest, and most concealed, depressions I had ever seen.

We fought this depression together for an entire year. I worked on self-love, figuring out how to not feel alone even at times when I am alone. He tried to teach me how to fill the void with my own love, and how to seek out joy again. I tried to pick up new hobbies, even got another dog to try and attach myself to something more healthy. I started to not feel heavy all the time. I felt like I was separating myself from that empty identity. I learned how to love solidarity, and my time alone. But then the opposite started to happen: I began to feel numb. And that felt good.

Feeling nothing felt like an accomplishment to me. I didn’t have to hurt, I didn’t have to feel like I needed to fill myself with anything. The vacancy started to feel like home, because it was familiar. If I didn’t care about anything, then nothing could hurt me. It seemed like a positive. Anyone that knows me, knows that I have the most gigantic heart; I lead with my heart in all things. I care SO much, sometimes TOO much. I have always been passionate and open to love, even when it did me wrong. But I started to not care at all, about anything. If someone didn’t want to be with me? Fuck it. If someone was mad at me? Eh. If I met a guy and he wanted nothing but a meaningless, empty, no-strings-attached relationship? GREAT, that’s perfect. Effortless and careless felt good. Being alone felt good. I didn’t care about a single thing, and after a while, that started to scare the shit out of me. Who was I? Where did I go? Why don’t I feel anything about anything? I craved love, companionship, and affection my entire life; now, I wanted no part of it. I actually ran from it, cutting off any person that showed interest in me. It was the complete opposite of me. It was a defense mechanism that I think I naturally put in place; I had felt so much pain over the last five years that I just couldn’t bear to feel it anymore. I thought feeling nothing would be easier, to protect me from that self-destruction. I didn’t want to be close to anyone because that meant being vulnerable, that someone could hurt me. They could tear me apart and bring back all that pain that I learned, somehow, to numb. The destructive behavior started again: men were absolutely awful to me. They used me for whatever they could get, and walked all over me because I let them. I was abused mentally, emotionally, and sexually. I let them because I felt nothing. Even when I did feel something — usually pain — I didn’t have the strength to even fight back.

This was the shutdown. This was the complete abandonment of myself. I thought I was helping and fixing myself, but I was actually destroying myself. I completely desensitized and broke down into a hollow shell. Nothing mattered. Nothing was special to me. Nothing hurt.

Nothing hurt.

And then,

him.

He came on the heels of a beautiful summer, filled with real happiness. I was still working on myself, still battling the pain, but I was starting to feel less like a ghost. I moved into a beautiful house with roommates (I had lived alone for two years, which only fueled my depression), and watched my sister get married to the love of her life. I had just gotten back from the most amazing vacation in Bermuda, where I soaked up every drop of hot Caribbean sun and ate enough fruit for an army. I felt recharged. And then, he appeared out of nowhere; I didn’t even have to really look. We met by chance, and in an instant — literally, in one night — my life flipped totally upside down, in the best way possible. There it was: I felt something. I felt A LOT of things, more than I had felt in years. He looked at me like I was art. He treated me like I was rare. He filled me with so much happiness. But here’s the kicker: I always felt like I needed someone to make me feel whole. He made me feel like I could be whole on my own. He didn’t love me because he had to; he loved me because he wanted to, and I had never really experienced something so pure and effortless. He loved my laugh, my heart. He loved how emotional I was. With every emotion that started to pour out of me, he loved me more; he had no idea that I had hidden and numbed everything I ever felt until I met him. I felt my entire self reconstructing every single day. I realized how worthy I am of love, and how much I do deserve, because I was being shown constantly. I felt whole: something I don’t think I’ve ever really felt in my entire life. The blank space was really gone, for the first time.

And then, it all got ripped away from me, one by one, no matter how tightly I️ held on.

This is depression. This is why I am “sad” even when you think I shouldn’t be, or that I have no reason to be. Although this is much more than sadness: this is rebuilding over and over and over again, only to get dismantled. It’s that feeling of hitting the ground after you feel like you finally figured out how to get back on your feet. It is exhausting and after a while, you don’t have the energy to try anymore; you don’t even see the point. Depression is that voice in the back of your head that constantly reminds you how you’ve failed. It tells you that you aren’t good enough. It really is emptiness, and it’s more painful than I could have ever imagined after having felt so full of life. This isn’t about one person, or one event in my life; this is a hole that I just can’t escape from. This is because being alone is the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life, and right now, I’ve never felt more alone. It has haunted me since childhood, and while I never wanted to feel it again at all, I just wasn’t even ready this time. It feels like I got hit by a tidal wave while I was standing by the ocean, taking in the beautiful view.

Being alone brings back that blank space, that aching vacancy inside of me that I could never quite locate. I forced myself to forget this hurt, the way the mind blocks out painful memories. Now, I’m being begged to remember.

Depression waits at your door until you open it and let it back in. It steals everything from you, hollows you out to the point of nothingness. The process of standing back up and finding your strength only to get knocked back down again is incredibly hard; I’ve been through it twice already, and I’m not ready to go through it again. No one is. So, if you’re still reading, remember what you thought in the beginning of this story; think about what you know about me. Some of you might be my closest friends, and have never known and would never know about the battle I’ve been fighting. I’ve perfected the art of concealment. Every time you think about telling someone to get over it, remember that you have no idea what storm is seeking and destroying beneath the surface. Don’t judge these people, and try not to be afraid of them; they need you. Don’t write them off as over-emotional or hyper-sensitive, because these people have beautiful souls. Their hearts literally ache to give love to other people, but they have been beaten down to believe they aren’t even worth it. I’m one of these people. My courage fights with my depression every single day. I’m trying, really trying, to believe that I am enough despite always being told that I’m not.

I am enough. I am enough. I am enough.