Everyone is sad every once in a while. It’s a part of life. But during my junior year of high school, I began to feel as if sad was all I was. The hardest part of my day was convincing myself that it was worth getting out of bed in the morning. I would cry for no other reason than that it felt right. I gained weight and didn’t want to spend time with friends. Sometimes, I even hated my friends just for being my friends: when they would try to get me out of my home, when they would ask me what was wrong, when the would pry and bother me. It was as if a switch had been flipped from normal to unhappy; no matter what I tried, I couldn’t flip it back.
For apparently no reason at all, this sadness had crept up on me, and I couldn’t shake it. Nothing was bothering me. I was doing well in school, had great friends, was active in everything I wanted to be active in. Sure, papers stressed me out, and tests made me anxious, but not any more than they had in the past. It seemed like I should be happy, but I didn’t feel it. What I did feel was the urge to hurt myself, and I started taking too much aspirin and sleeping medication just to see what would happen, to see if it would numb the pain.
I looked at what I was becoming, what I was doing to myself, and it terrified me. A friend of mine finally suggested therapy. Even the word felt taboo. I didn’t know anyone who had gone to therapy. I was initially resistant, but when I realized that this aching unhappiness wasn’t going away, I agreed to start seeing someone.
Therapy felt awkward and uncomfortable. Though my friends were telling me how brave I was, I didn’t feel brave at all. I felt needy and weak. I hated sitting and talking about myself for an hour. The therapist theorized that the cause of my sadness stemmed from either my friends or pressure at school. But even when I took time away from my friends or had a lull in schoolwork, I felt the same. The therapist would ask me what was wrong, what was bothering me, and the answer was always the same: nothing.
My parents kept asking me when I’d be “cured.” They couldn’t understand why they needed to pay someone to hear my problems, but they supported my decision nonetheless. After months of sessions and thousands of my parents’ dollars later, the therapist told me she thought I had clinical depression. She deduced that there were no underlying causes to how I was feeling. That was the tricky thing about my depression. There wasn’t necessarily a cause or a reason. A person’s brain just may not produce the right chemicals for someone to be happy. So she referred me to a psychiatrist for a prescription.
The psychiatrist met with me and decided to get me started on Prozac, an antidepressant. My parents were not pleased with the idea: as avid exercise and health enthusiasts, they didn’t really believe in medication. But the psychologist assured me that this medication wasn’t for life. It was a cure, she said, a way to teach my brain to produce the chemicals it needed and in a year or so, I’d be done. After much bickering and fighting, my parents allowed me to give the medication a test run.
Immediately, I felt a change. I was suddenly happy when I should be happy. I enjoyed spending time with my friends. Getting up in the morning wasn’t a challenge anymore. I dropped down to a skinnier, healthier weight and finally felt like my old self. I felt like I was on top of the world.
Everything felt good again. In fact, it felt great. It wasn’t until my choir performance senior year that I noticed something was wrong. During the last concert, the seniors always performed a song they had written for the choir students they were leaving behind. My best friends were in choir. I’d dedicated my life to the group, hours upon hours. As we sang, holding hands and hugging, everyone around me started to cry. One by one, their tears fell as they looked into the faces of those they were leaving behind. But even as I handed my best friends tissues and let them rest their heads on my shoulders, I felt nothing. Not one tear came to me. There was no sadness. No, I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t sad. Shouldn’t I be? This was an emotional, heart-wrenching moment, and I couldn’t even muster a frown.
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I began to notice that my mood rarely changed, never straying far from delighted to mild contentment. I didn’t cry at the end of a sad movie. I would watch my friend sob after a horrible break-up, and the only emotion I felt was annoyance. How could they be so sad while I couldn’t feel anything beyond a happy numbness?
I asked the psychiatrist how much longer she thought I should stay on the medication. I was itching to be done with it. A while longer, she told me, definitely a little while into college because moving away from home would be such an adjustment. Maybe, she’d said to me, I’d decide that I wanted to be on it forever.
Forever? Forever had never been mentioned. I began to panic. I didn’t want to be on a drug for the rest of my life. Sure, I wasn’t sad anymore, but I also wasn’t sad ever. I stopped taking it right away, a few weeks before I was leaving for college. I never called to schedule another appointment with the psychiatrist and she never called me.
The “cure” theory hadn’t worked: the depression came back, and it hit hard. In a new school, in a new state, every day was a struggle. I didn’t know anyone. I had to fight my instincts to be a recluse in order to make even one friend at my new school. Many times, I would tell my new friends that I was sick or had a huge test just to get out of spending time with them. I would pretend to be asleep when they came into my room so they wouldn’t invite me out for dinner. They never noticed that something was wrong. They had never really met the normal me, so this reclusive, sad person was all they knew.
Over winter break of my freshman year, I decided that I had to fix whatever this was, and I had to do it myself. I wanted to enjoy college like a normal teenager. I wanted my schoolmates to enjoy being around me, and I wanted to enjoy being around them. I began reading up about depression. I looked up homeopathic cures and researched self-help for people like me. I even read books on how to emote good energy into the world, books about keeping your thoughts clean and how the universe will give you peace of mind if you ask for it. Whatever the tactic, whether scientific or a little bit kooky, I gave it try.
I’d heard that chemicals in food could alter moods, so I rearranged my diet. I ate mostly organic, cut back on caffeine, and almost completely cut out soda. I had always enjoyed the gym, but now I started exercising every day. The endorphins powered me for hours. I did yoga to calm myself down and ran to pump myself up.
Every day, I would wake up and tell myself ten times, I am happy. After a while, I began to believe it. I didn’t feel like I was drowning. Happiness wasn’t a struggle anymore. Some days, I found a smile more challenging than others, but I could see, not too far in the distance, normal. My friends got to meet the old me, the girl that actually enjoyed going out and smiled more often than she cried. I was giving myself the love I deserved, whether I felt like I deserved it in that moment or not.
Every day, I still say aloud to myself, “Life is good. I am happy.” I have to remind myself. When I get into a funk, which I occasionally still do, I don’t let it consume me, I fight my way out. I take care of my physical being so that my mental one can follow suit. And most days, I am happy. And you know what? It feels good.
Photo Credits:
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http://nutrivize.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Prozac-Interbrand.c…
http://www.cidpusa.org/depression-help.jpg