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How 12 Years of Dire Depression Has Elevated My Self-Confidence
I used to believe I was an incompetent failure; now, I feel prepared for whatever life throws at me
As a teenager, I was never self-confident.
In addition to being diagnosed with clinical depression in 2013, I was also told I had a serious inferiority complex. I felt incompetent, I felt incapable, I felt like a failure. Those feelings have been for me lifelong companions.
Over the past couple years, however, there has surged within me a new feeling, one that counteracts, often eclipses, the inferiority, one that is now pushing me forward through life with head held high: a quiet but ingrained assurance that I am capable of taking on whatever life throws at me.
And what has given me this self-confidence? Mental illness.
See, in the beginning, I was shellshocked. Within a year, I had gone from a giggling, gregarious child to a morose, hopeless teenager; I might have been diagnosed at 14, but I had been grappling with the soul-sucking workings of clinical depression at least since I had turned 13.
My depression was severe. As was the anxiety, given that I would go on to be diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and panic disorder the…
