Anonymous
If we are going to be brutally honest, I would say that I have suffered from rather intense depression and anxiety since I was 12 years old. Like many, mine was triggered by the traumatic divorce and other events surrounding that when I was in intermediate. My mother was hospitalised for several months due to a manic episode and was still psychotic for a longer period of time. It was at this time that I was caught up with some bad friends who did bad things. I turned into a hermit. I hated my situation at home and hated by situation outside of home equally. Basically, I hated existing. My Dad seemingly forgot about me as he wooed his new lady friend who moved in 3-4 months after Dad moved out of Mums house. Everyone was going through so much that I didn’t want to bother anyone with my problems. My mother wasn’t sane and my Dad had a new girlfriend he was trying to tie down. There wasn’t any space for my problems. So, naturally, I kept them bottled up until night time where I would lie in bed and cry for hours on end and hurt myself so no one would hear or see. I smiled all day. No one had a clue.
At this time, mental illness became almost a trend. A cool trait to have to give your character dimension. People threw around self-diagnoses as if it were nothing. The reaction to that was extreme sympathy or extreme disgust. You were either babied and never treated the same again or told to man up and stop whining. That is why I never told anyone. I kept it all to myself as I tried to help all of the pseudo victims as they invented stories to feed me for some kind of attention. Don’t get me wrong, there were some legitimate cases but there were endless that ended up being literal stories. They used to speak to me through Tumblr and I would sit there and reply to the dozens of messages a night I would get, focusing all my energy on helping those who I thought needed it and not on myself. Along with the messages asking for help, I got flooded with messages telling me people hated me and that I should ‘do everyone a favour and kill [myself]’, that I was worthless, that I was fat, that all my friends were playing a joke on me and didn’t genuinely care about me. It was all I saw for all of the hours I was awake. I reached the worst I had ever been when I was in year 10 and I was sitting on the side of my bed with a note in my hand and was ready to commit suicide. That’s when I realised that I would never get to see my best friends again, or learn how to drive. I wouldn’t go travelling. I wouldn’t have a family or know what it was like being in love or truly happy. I wouldn’t see my sisters again or laugh at one of their stupid jokes. I was 14, I had a whole life ahead of me that I was trying to cut short. I went to school the next day as if nothing had happened.
It was then that I realised how fragile life was and how lucky I am to be alive. I get to see the stars every night and watch movies that I love. I made friends that I love and who love me. Slowly but surely I started feeling a little bit better until it was manageable. Last year I felt myself slipping quite quickly backwards and finally told my family. My Dad was ‘blind-sided’ and took it personally. He was the one I was most scared about telling because he was never really good with that sort of thing. He surprised me the next week and took me go karting, he told me he loved me and would do everything he could to help me. I was shocked to be quite honest. Someone who I actively hid to from for five years turned out to be the most supportive. He told me that everything made sense now, all the times that I stayed home, all the time I went to school without a wink of sleep. He told me he was glad I told him and that we would get through it.
It was one of the scariest things I have ever done, occasionally I regret it, but I am so much safer and more open with my friends and family. They understand who I am and the way I act. I only wish I had done it sooner, before it got to the point where I may not have woken up in the morning.
