Depression is a hideous ball of goo that sticks to everything you do and see in your daily life, but most important of all, yourself. Imagine waking up in the morning only to want to go back to sleep because it took you hours the night before. When you finally do get up, half of the day is gone and you’re miserably trying to go about daily routine tasks; such as taking a shower or brushing your teeth, which mind you, is an exhausting and sometimes annoying effort. It’s a black hole of not just our minds, but of our entire existence. Nothing escapes its gravity; everything and everyone in your life is affected by its wrath to some degree. I have realized this after dealing with depression for years, and it has enlightened me as to how much a seemingly internal malady can create so much external conflict. Depression and how it affects your surroundings is just one of the aspects of what many people call “the beast”. Depression is “the beast”. It is a ferocious, unrelenting, primordial beast of an affliction that robs us of our lives, and turns it into a living nightmarish hell filled with grief and hopelessness of the future. Depression depends on the person. For some people depression creeps into their lives slowly, like the flu. In the beginning you may feel ok, with a few sniffles and aches, but later on you’re bedridden with a 103-degree fever coughing your lungs out. For others, depression appears like a head on collision going at 100 mph. For me, depression started out like a sky dive without a parachute, hitting the earth, and coming out the other side into outer space, in other words, I fell and hit rock bottom so hard I fell through it.
Let me explain.
I was born in an Alabama Hospital on June 3, 1993, which coincidently happens to be the same as my late Grandmother. With my father being in the military, it required us to relocate every few years, taking us from Alabama to Arizona, to Virginia and California, where we eventually settled in Virginia where I have been for the last 14 years or so. For those of you like me that hate doing math, that means I’m 23 years old. Life was just fine, even good throughout all of those years we moved across the country. We experienced a lot of things that not many people do anymore. We saw countless national parks, the most interesting being Yellowstone and the Canyon Lands, which I always thought was actually candy lands. I guess that’s just what I heard, but it does make it pretty hysterical when I think back on it. I remember coming home from school one day in 2001 and seeing the World Trade Center’s burning on National television. My mother was crying and I didn’t comprehend it at the time, but I had a sense of something terrible happening. Later that year my father was assigned to the Pentagon, so we moved back to Virginia. I’ve always considered Virginia my home, even though I was born in Alabama, and lived in several other states for some years in my childhood. I just feel this sense of familiarity and a bond with the surrounding environment that makes me feel comfortable. I guess its just probably the fact that I’ve lived here most of my life.
Probably that.
I went to school like most people and graduated with an advanced studies diploma in 2012. It was a great relief to have that behind me, but it also taught me a great deal about whom I was, and although it was perhaps some of the worst years of my life, it was also the most precious. I made many friends and had great teachers who genuinely cared and were passionate about their subject. The cafeteria food on the other hand, well, lets just say it’s not the focus of this article. I actually threw up on my first day of senior year, at lunch. Before I get to that, lets rewind a bit. Freshman year I decided to join the football team so that meant lifting weights and doing whatever else for about two and a half hours Monday through Thursday every week. I was already an avid weightlifter and was excited to see how I measured up against all of the other guys. In elementary school I would do sit-ups in the bathroom and hide dumbbells in the cabinet because I liked watching myself perform bicep curls in the mirror. By 6th grade I received a bench press set from my parents for Christmas. As it turns out, I was “ok”, not great, but better that a few people. Having a few years of some mediocre weight training experience gave me a slight advantage in my age group. I made some decent progress, but ended up quitting after the second two-a-day session during the summer because I was too intimidated. Physically it wasn’t a big deal, but after being sunburned quite badly and just being miserable I didn’t want it anymore and enough was enough. I had a surgery scheduled to get all four of my wisdom teeth extracted a week before school starting and I just didn’t want to have to find a way to manage that with the football program. I knew it disappointed my dad, but it also let the team down and embarrassed myself. Lets just say I tried to make myself invisible for the weeks that followed. No one ever gave me grief over it, but I still felt ashamed for quitting. Quitting is something I made quite a habit of during that time and I think it led to lower self-esteem levels, which probably gave initial traction for my eventual depression.
Just a month and half later into my sophomore year I was in the emergency room because I tried to break up a fight between two dogs and ended up getting bitten in the process. When the nurse cleaned it out, or in medical terms, irrigated it, I experienced some of the worst physical pain I had ever felt. Imagine take a syringe fit for a giant and filling it to the brim with this pink, anti-septic fluid, and then pushing the plunger down into my wound, filling it and washing it out. The process was done several times and remarkably I didn’t cry, just welled up a bit and groaned for a while. I remember the nurse telling me that men don’t cry and how I shouldn’t cry. Maybe that was her attempt at humor, but for me it was no laughing matter. I had school tomorrow and it was Friday. My arm was wrapped up and I was discharged at about 1:30 in the morning. Needless to say I was awake until 5 and decided not to go to school.
That’s when things turned for the worse.