Not Alone

One of my missions in writing this blog is to share my experiences of having a mental illness, and to also say that it's OK to not be 'OK'. I apologise if this is all over the place but I need to pour my heart out.

A friend of mine posted her 'Class of 2000' reunion pictures on Facebook. We didn't go to the same school, and I was class of '99 anyway. But seeing the smiling faces of people ten years on from their high school graduation made me smile too. Why? I may not have been here ten years later writing this. Something which affected me greatly this week was a piece about an anonymous person posting his/her suicidal wish to PostSecret, the anonymous postcard phenomenon. 60,000 people banded together to try and get a message to this anonymous poster to reassure them that they were not alone and were loved. And what amazed me most of all was the amount of teenagers who did this. I was so proud of every single one of them. When I was diagnosed with depression, it was taboo and not talked about, really. What I am seeing now from this side of things is that teens are often misunderstood...and I believe that teen depression is often misinterpreted as just being moody teenagers. One phenomenon that wasn't talked about when I was in high school is the bullying of GLBT teens, as well as cyber bullying. It's bad enough being a GLBT teen trying to navigate the perils of high school, but now the bullies can reach you right in your living room.

I was bullied from day one at primary school, through high school and unbelievably when I went to teacher's college, which was disgusting. So you imagine all of those years of being told you weren't good enough, that something was obviously wrong with you but nobody ever told you what it was except for the fact it had something to do with being bright, something you had no control over. And it took its toll. I attempted suicide in my senior year and was diagnosed with depression but at this point the after-care was non-existent apart from handing me some pills. As bad as being depressed and suicidal was, the time afterwards was my lowest point. I am still angry at the girls who bullied me, I don't know how you make your way through that kind of pain and come out the other side but with a lot of research and experience I have been able to reconstruct my life and make it a happy one.

When you are so low that you can't believe you're still alive and wonder why you are, I think that's when you can rebuild. I lived, and there was obviously a reason for that. I guess what I really want to say is that there are so many people in the world who feel alone, who are suffering from depression or another form of mental illness and they are real, living, breathing people, not a circus sideshow. If I could go back to that young person I was ten years ago I would tell her she wasn't alone, even if it felt like that. That life really is worth living, that it's not the circumstances, it's the crazy brain chemicals making her think otherwise. I'd ask her to take care of herself.