The Fear of Breaking

I remember the first time I felt a little different; like I had a piece of darkness inside of me that I couldn’t quite recognize. I was just a little girl, and I had everything that any child could want: devoted parents, a brave older sister who I idolized, a roof over my head and a brilliant mind. I was surrounded by love, and I was encouraged to chase my dreams and believe in my imagination; but I would lay in bed at night and think about the heaviness of sadness, and how it filled me. I’d close my eyes and dream about loneliness. I’d curl up into a ball under bright-colored blankets and twist and turn underneath a ceiling covered in glow-in-the-dark stars, subconsciously running away from monsters that only lived in my mind.

As I got older, I experienced heartbreak, loss, pain. I lost friends, and gained new ones. I fell in love for the first time hard, and fell out of it even harder. I gathered stories, memories, and scars over the years, and all the while, continued to wake in the middle of most nights with a stone in my chest and a faded recollection of another dream about running.

But what was I running from?

In my Freshman year of college, I experienced my first “breakdown.” Moving out of my home and into a college dorm was incredibly hard for me. Being so attached to my family made living away from them torturous; I felt homesick every second I was at school, despite having my best friend as a roommate. Bad dreams turned into vivid nightmares, and nightmares turned into night terrors. Most nights, my roommate would shake me awake and tell me I was screaming. Some nights, I would wake myself up — forcefully ripping myself out of my own mind to come back to reality. The nightmares were always the same: I’d lose my entire family to some kind of tragic accident, and I would end up alone. Alone: the idea of it haunted me, and it continued to haunt me throughout my young-adult years.

When my first serious relationship ended after six years, I was 22 and absolutely lost. The loss was devastating in a way that I couldn’t understand; I felt like an empty shell of myself. I moved back home with my parents, and slept on a mattress on their living room floor every night. I had no idea what I was doing: with my life, or with the puzzle pieces of myself I was left with to reconstruct. What do I do next? Where do I go from here? Am I okay? I didn’t know.

Not knowing was the hardest part.

I spiraled into a darkness I had never experienced. My body felt like a vacated machine, working and operating but basically on autopilot. I felt alone in a way that just can’t be described as loneliness. I began to drown in everything and nothing at the same time, desperate to break the surface but lacking the strength. I knew I was falling into an impossibly deep and complicated mess, but I had no idea how to stop myself from hitting the ground. Somehow, as if it was just another bad dream, I grabbed myself by the shoulders and shook myself awake. I tore myself out of it — that unspecified, nondescript and vague blackness — and let myself know that I was okay. I walked out of that darkness almost unscathed. I like to think I was younger; stronger; resilient.

I stood back up on my own two feet and pushed on. I went back to school, got my degree, and moved out into my own apartment. I gracefully walked into my career in Youth Services as if I hadn’t struggled through six years of grueling undergraduate programs. I met new people, made new friends. I nursed and numbed the old wounds, and tried to prepare myself for new ones. I ignored the sadness. I silenced the loneliness. I filled the void with temporary joys: one night stands, drunken weekends, mediocre and half loves.

I stopped the bleeding. I thought that was enough.

It was enough until September of 2015. I agreed to go on a blind date with a complete stranger who ended up taking so much more from me than just my dignity. You never think it’ll happen to you; you tell yourself that things like this don’t happen to people like you, until it does. I found myself with a stranger’s hand wrapped around my neck in the backseat of my own car, and there wasn’t a single nightmare I had that could have prepared me for this reality. I fought my rapist until I fell out of my car onto the sidewalk headfirst, my shirt ripped and my skin red and bruised. He walked away from the scene, drunk and unmarked, and I was left to suffer. I had just barely managed to escape him, but the damage was already done. The line between emotional and physical pain was completely blurred as I picked myself up from the ground, shook the dirt from my hair and wiped the blood from my elbows, and got back into my car to drive home. Weeks later, when the bruises faded and the cuts healed, I reported the attempted rape and told my parents. My mom cried. My dad yelled.

How could you let someone do that to you? He demanded an answer that I could not give.

I convinced myself that I let it happen to me, and allowed the people that knew about the incident to think that, too. A blind date? They’d ask. I felt myself caving in, the shame and the fear burying me. Everyone had their own ideas about me and what happened to me; everyone cared about why, but no one understood that questioning it made the wound deeper. I tirelessly tread water for months, barely keeping my head above the waves, until I had a nightmare that changed everything.

I sat in my room and held a bottle of pills in my hand. I tipped it, and dumped out a pile of big, white capsules into my open palm. I closed my eyes and put them in my mouth and swallowed with a gulp of water. I laid down on my bed and started to cry as I remembered the times I felt weightless joy; I thought about the people I love and things I still want to do, and realized I may have made a mistake. “I don’t want to die,” I thought. I rushed out of my apartment to my car, and drove myself to the hospital. I ran into the ER and up to a reception desk, and begged the person sitting behind it to help me. “Please,” I said. “I took pills to kill myself but I don’t want to die.” The woman looked at me blankly as she handed me a clipboard. She said, “Fill this form out. Someone will be with you shortly.” I felt myself getting dizzy and tired. “I don’t have time,” I pleaded with her. “I need help. Please help me. I don’t want to die.” I fell to the ground in front of her as my legs lost their strength. The room began to spin. “I’m dying,” I said. “Please don’t let me die.” She looked down at me and said, “Someone will be with you shortly.”

Someone will be with you shortly.

I ripped myself out of the nightmare, and woke up in a puddle of my own tears. It was 3:07am. I put on a sweatshirt and sneakers, left my apartment, and drove to my parents’ house. I slept next to my mom. I had countless nightmares growing up, but none as vivid and real as this one, where I tried to take my own life away and begged an emotionless stranger to save me. It scared me so much to realize how alone I was feeling, and I knew that the dream was a cry for help from myself. How could I have let it get this bad? I remember thinking. When the morning came, I called every doctor’s office until one would see me that day. When I finally got through to an office that was willing to bring me in for an appointment, I cried some more. Relief. I hadn’t felt that for a while.

Depression has changed me as a person. It is a part of every single day, like background music to a movie. But in many ways, I feel that it’s made me a better person; it drives me to be strong, and to trust myself to keep going. I struggled for so many years with an unrecognizable emptiness, and ran from it until I became too tired to continue. I fought the waves of the storm within me until I began to drown. It all caught up to me and nearly destroyed me from the inside out. My hurt will never dissipate completely, and I’ve finally started to understand that that’s okay. Instead of forgetting, I’ve made room for my hurt to coexist with all of the rebuilt strength, courage, and hope. It’s a memory of how hard I hit the ground, but still found a way to get back up. Depression is weighed down by a stigma that those who feel it are broken, and that is so far from the truth. It took me a long time, but I finally realize that I am not broken; I am not empty. I am not alone. There are good days and bad days, and sometimes I still don’t exactly know what I’m doing. But there was a time I longed for completion, without knowing what that would even feel like or if I would ever feel it. The completion is within ourselves; we just have to be brave on our journey.

I was unofficially diagnosed with PTSD in 2009, after my first breakdown in college. I sought out help from my school’s Counseling Center after the nightmares and losing too much sleep. I did 8 weeks of talk-therapy, until my boyfriend at the time told me I was “fine” and should stop going. I listened. I did not seek out professional help again until 2016, 10 months after the attempted rape. I was officially diagnosed with PTSD, with a correlating phobia-specific Panic + Anxiety Disorder, and also diagnosed with Depression. I have been in therapy for 6 months. I am grateful, every single day, that I found help. I would not have made it through the darkness on my own again. I truly believe that it saved my life.

I am grateful for the aching and the breaking;

I learned to love the fall because it taught me the strength to rise.