The long road ahead – my experiences with depression

TRIGGER WARNING: depression and self-harm.

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]epression is a difficult thing to quantify. It exists as this dark, icy malaise that you one day wake to find has consumed you whole. It robs you of all sense of rational reasoning, purpose or emotion.

You seem only to exist as a burden to others; worthless beyond compare in a society so predicated on superficial value. When, and indeed if, you ever emerge, you find that after everything that’s happened you’re no longer the same person you once were.

For me, that malaise broke exactly two years ago. I stopped self-harming for the first time in over a year and a half. It was still another six months before I was able to come off of my anti-depressant medication . The summer prior, on July 3 I’d attempted to kill myself. For whatever reason, I didn’t go through with it. It would be easy to blame my sense of worthlessness of my parents’ expectations of me, or the fact that I’m an only child. But I don’t.

You seem only to exist as a burden to others

These expectations, as unrealistic and demanding as they are, have always been mine. I’ve never been able to live up to these aspirations. It is because of that I’ve felt worthless. For me, self-harm was quite literally torture. It was a way to punish myself for being a failure, a way to make myself suffer for mistakes that I’d made. It was also a release, a distraction from my own sense of inadequacy and incompetence that felt almost impossible to shake.

The final nail in the coffin was at the hands of a girl. She was, and still is, the only person I’ve ever confessed to loving. She meant everything to me, and I opened up to her in a way I’d never done with anyone else. I believed that she loved me back.

Self-harm was quite literally torture

In the end she found someone else, and that was too much for me. It confirmed what I’d always believed in my heart; that I was second best, not good enough for anyone. I see now that she did love me and that my suffering caused her a great deal of pain. But in the midst of it all, I was blind to it. All I saw was my own pain. It still took me nearly two years to climb out of the hole that it had sent me into.

It was not the cause of my depression; that had always been there. It simply served as a catalyst. On that very same day last summer I returned to the spot where I’d stood two years prior. I remember feeling a certain sense of pride that I’d made it so far, despite what I’d felt and done, but that pride was still tinged with doubt.

All I saw was my own pain

No matter how hard I focused on where I was now, part of me still empathised with those feelings of darkness from the past. Still, two years on, barely a day goes by where I don’t look at my scars and think about starting again. Those thoughts and feelings that drove me to self-harm and suicidal thoughts still linger in my mind.

Whenever I speak to friends who’ve dealt with depression, they bear an incredible guilt on their shoulders. Many of them, seemingly past their darkest days, still agonise over the thoughts that linger in their minds. They feel that they should be free of these thoughts now that they’re ‘better’. It eats them up because they feel that there must be something uniquely wrong with them. This is not the case.

Thoughts and feelings that drove me to self-harm and suicidal thoughts still linger in my mind

As an old friend once told me, depression isn’t something that simply passes, you just learn to live with it. You find your green light, your north star, something that gives you a reason to live. You learn to find happiness and joy in the day to day. If you too feel tormented by the thoughts from your darker days, then know this; you are not lesser for these thoughts. You are no less a person and of no less value to the friends and the family that surround you. You understand the value of a human life because you can feel how fragile it is.

You can’t live in this world, with all its anguish and strife, and not be scarred by it. We feel this pain, but through our pain we come to empathise and recognise it in others. We learn to help one another when we see them suffer because we understand that pain.

You just learn to live with it

There are moments where the pain will burn a hole in your chest, and you’ll cry until you feel dead inside. But those moments pass, and you’re strong enough to overcome them, no matter how much they may hurt. The road ahead is a long one, and the storm cloud that lingers overheard will stay with you. But despite this there are still moments where the sun breaks through. The road ahead is a long one, but it is one that you can travel, with others or alone.