Making Peace with My Depression’s Complicated Legacy
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TW: discussions of depression, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts.
I’ve been some flavor of mentally ill since puberty, and severely depressed since college onward. The root of my depression? Birth.
I came into the world saddled with an unfortunate biological cocktail that left me genetically-predisposed to:
- Autism
- Crippling anxiety
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder
- Major depressive disorder (with suicidal ideation! Yay!)
- ADHD
- Morbid obesity
- Type 2 diabetes
- Tummy troubles
- Something about my cholesterol, I have to watch my salt intake or something like that
And, as a bonus…
- A DOUBLE genetic predisposition to alcoholism (how fun!)
Granted, not all of these lovely combinations have been activated so far, and some even cancel each other out. For example, my anxiety problems and insufferable scrupulosity that comes with obsessive-compulsive disorder means that I am pretty careful about my substance use, making alcoholism unlikely to occur unless I try really, really hard to become an alcoholic. Having a physiology that can barely handle caffeine helps in this endeavor.
Ditto for type 2 diabetes: all I’ve got to do is stay away from the donuts!
The mental health woes are a tad more complicated. Since I started experiencing debilitating anxiety problems at puberty, I internalized the message growing up that I was never doing enough to be a mentally-healthy, well-adjusted person. There was always something more I could be doing to be less anxious, some Bible verse about trusting God I could pound into my tiny skull, maybe a vitamin I could take.
And my intrusive thoughts trying to convince me that I was an irredeemable monster? I just needed to redirect my thoughts towards something else, like God!
Easy peasy.
In 2015, the transition from living at home with family to being at college ended up triggering that pesky little depression gene, lying in wait this whole time. It had reared its ugly head before when I was in high school, but college was truly its time to shine.
Within the first six months, I was beginning to wonder if going to my university had been a terrible mistake. I was nineteen, losing sleep on a regular basis, and wanted to die. This was only a taste of what the next three-and-a-half years would bring me.
I spiraled fast and hard after my first semester away from home. I would spend hours online reading fifteen, twenty, twenty-five articles a day. I used Facebook compulsively, cybersexed compulsively, researched any and all mental health symptoms compulsively, frittered away hours and hours of free time. I neglected hundreds of opportunities poured into my lap, including my Honors program thesis, all because I was too depressed to function.
My insomnia was so severe that I don’t remember most of the first semester of my sophomore year. I frequently skipped or was late to class due to sleeping in — something very out-of-character for me as a high school straight-A student. Any night that wasn’t spent giving in to my compulsions was spent either crying and wanting to die, or dissociating and wanting to die.
I’d alternate between forcing myself to socialize and floating away from my body the whole time, or being a recluse. When I was around people, I was a wild card, either saying the most crazy and outlandish things for attention or shutting down completely and word-vomiting my traumas on anyone who would care to listen.
In my sophomore, junior, and senior year, I decided to more actively pursue medication and therapy. The only medication I was on in college — Zoloft — resulted in a depressive-suicidal episode so severe that I started to break with reality slightly.
I was convinced that God was using the film The Lovely Bones by Peter Jackson to tell me that it was my time to go. I either felt nothing or had ongoing emotional flashbacks to tumultuous teenage years the whole summer of 2017. I had to leave my summer camp job prematurely because I’d actively made plans to overdose on my medication in the woods. I also had head lice. 2017 was just not my year.
I went through at least three therapists before I found one I was able to click with. Through no fault of their own, none of the therapists I found through my college’s wellness program worked for me. It wasn’t until my senior year when I found a brilliant and amazing one who was on my wavelength. And guess what?
I still struggled. I still struggle. I am not cured. Bible verses did not cure me. Eating vegetables did not cure me. Taking unaffordable supplements that make my poop weird did not cure me. Going outside did not cure me.
Nothing has cured my depression. It is in remission now, but it hasn’t magically gone away with better habits. I can manage it better with Celexa (a game-changing medication), therapy, and living in a stable environment with safe, supportive family members.
I write. I find ways to pass the time with cleaning and errands. I actively spend time with family and friends. I can manage. I don’t want to kill myself as much.
My depression is still there.
After graduating college, I was saddled with a heavy plethora of shame, always dragging behind me like Rodrigo Mendoza’s penance in the 1986 film The Mission. I continued therapy. I fell into a cycle of starting and quitting job after job, still traumatized by my severe college depression and the havoc it wreaked on my life.
Despite pursuing therapy and medication, my mental health problems did not magically disappear. Even in my most stable years, I struggled with intrusive thoughts about my family dying, about things I’d done in college, about all the ways I was an inadequate and monstrous subhuman thing. I had survived college, and graduated just as I did with high school: in survival mode and with barely any skills to emotionally regulate.
I’ve attempted suicide at least three more times since college, maybe four (I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve lost track). I’ve been hospitalized twice. The emotional trauma of multiple severe mental health episodes and two psych ward stays compounded whatever wacky wiring was already in place.
My medication dosage was increased, and it helped. I switched from talk therapy to internal family systems therapy and EMDR. Both have helped me tackle the decades of psychological scar tissue that’s built up over the years, store intrusive memories and sensations in the past, and generally be less of a dick to myself. It’s more akin to an exorcism than the gentle, conversational tone of talk therapy, but it’s working.
I write some more. I find more ways to pass the time — another stove to clean, laundry to do. I volunteer at my local animal shelter and do mutual aid projects. I’ve cleansed more of my karma.
I still have a rotting cluster of regrets.
One unusual aspect of EMDR therapy is that in order to do it successfully, I need to be able to stay in my body, watching my horrifying memories play out on the silver screen while remaining detached and in my flesh. Depression severs me from the body, which is why I frequently neglect it when spiraling hard.
Being in the body is also a terror. When I am engaged with myself physically, I am reminded of how much my back hurts, how shitty my lungs are during the winter and spring, how agonizingly boring and uncertain my life is as an unemployed person.
I risk depression when in my body, but I risk death when I choose to detach from it. It’s a strange paradox.
However, being in my body reminds me that the putrid corpse of my past is actually in the past. In the present, it is windy and I am still recovering from January’s bout of bronchitis. In the past, I wanted to die each and every day. In the present, I hydrate regularly and wake up earlier than I used to. In the past, I did many, many things that went against my moral values.
In the present, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to hold down a job, or if I’ll have to worry about money forever, or if I am a hideous failure and a leech and just in denial about it. In the past, I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to hold down a job, or if I’d have to worry about money forever, or if I was a hideous failure and a leech and just in denial about it.
Just like the past, I still have terrible thoughts, and regrets. The mental health cluster-cocktail of my genetic makeup hasn’t change, and as I get older, more genes will probably still be activated. I’m hoping the high cholesterol gene will skip over me, but in the meantime, I’m minding my sodium intake.
Here’s what has changed:
I know now the depression was never my fault. I am not a failure for being depressed, and I am not a monster for having done things I regret in my late teens and early twenties. God, imagine if we were all judged by things we did during that time period.
My depression has a bizarre, painful, and complicated legacy. It has also not gone away, but is in remission. I haven’t managed to cure myself through “better habits,” but I have managed to exist outside of sheer survival mode.
I don’t like being in my body all the time: it gets round in places I’d prefer it to not be round, it sends out pain signals that it should be blocking out, and it blocks out important signals that I shouldn’t be able to ignore (thanks, autism). But I’m in my body more often than not, and that’s progress.
I’m learning to not be at war constantly with what birth brought me, and not shame myself or let myself be shamed for being mentally ill. I survive, I manage, I make peace, I move on. And, I don’t currently want to die.
Memento mori.
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