C.P.

Many people hide their struggles well. A lot of people don’t even know most of the struggles I have gone through, including my entire family, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. I have been fighting mental health issues on and off for the past year of my life. It has likely been going on for longer than a year, it just didn’t become a big issue until recently. I was aware that I was more likely to suffer from mental health issues because of family history, but I didn’t expect depression to hit me this hard.

It all started last fall. I was sexually assaulted by a person I had considered one of my closest friends. I was blacked out drunk and I do not remember a single moment of it. To this day I don’t think he realizes what he did to me because according to him, I was the one who initiated it. When he told me his side of the story I didn’t really think that he had raped me, but that I had just made another bad decision like I have done many times before. It wasn’t until I mentioned what happened to one of my coworkers that she made me understand that I was in no state to give consent. I didn’t really know how to deal with this once I realized it because I had played it off as a dumb hookup. I tried to confide in one of my friends who also happened to be friends with my assaulter. I explained the situation and he pretty much told me that “he’s not a bad guy. I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt you.” The problem is that it didn’t matter if he meant to hurt me, it only mattered that he did. I don’t believe my assaulter expected me not to remember anything, but that didn’t change the fact that I felt violated and it was not okay.

I started to feel like there was no one around me that I could really trust. I ended up pushing everyone away because I felt like I wasn’t worth being defended. I just wanted to be alone. That way no one could hurt me. All of this happened to coincided with the end of another friendship and thus began the first bad depressive episode that I had ever experienced. At the time I didn’t really accept that this was depression, I told myself it was just a rough patch. I wanted to pretend like nothing was wrong and that I was in control of everything that had happened. As time started to pass from my sexual assault, I started to reach out to the friends I had pushed away. The friendships started to mend, and since I stopped feeling alone I started to recover. I continued on the rest of my third year with ups and downs but an overall stable mental state.

This changed at the beginning of this quarter which turned into the worst depressive episode of my life. The end of a long relationship caused all the emotions and depressed feelings that I had been pushing away for the past year to all flood out at once. I didn’t know how to deal with it all and went to a very bad place. In the beginning I didn’t even believe that it was depression. I just kept telling myself “You’re just being dramatic. You’re just doing this to get attention. You’re not even that bad.” But in reality I was a lot worse than I thought. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I wasn’t eating. I was skipping class. I saw no future for myself and I was considering taking the most permanent solution to make the pain go away forever. It wasn’t until I had one good day I realized how bad I really was.

Slowly I have been starting to be more of myself again. Or at least the self I remember I once was. I have just tried to keep pushing forward everyday. Every day is a new challenge but my only choices are to keep moving or give up. And as much as I want to give up, deep down I know it’s not the right choice for me to make. I try to keep myself busy and try to ignore bad thoughts that seem like they will never go away. I have to make sure I still go to class and do everything I can to make sure I don’t jeopardize the future I have set up for myself. Surrounding myself with people that support me and want to see me succeed is super important to my future. My best friend has been my biggest supporter, even though he was the most unexpected friend. He understands what I am going through and can see what I can’t even see for myself. Without him I don’t know where I’d even be at this point. All I know is that I haven’t given up.

Part of this event focuses on the comparison from real life to social media and I had never really thought of sharing my battles on social media before. I haven’t considered it because I’m scared. I don’t want people to know how much I have been hurt in my life. Especially when I have a tendency to blame all of these hardships on myself. Most people wouldn’t even consider sharing experiences like these because that’s not how our society works. We are expected to put forward our best self for social media and not consider doing anything different. But every time I see someone sharing how they are fighting depression, anxiety, an eating disorder, or anything else alike, all I do is respect them. It shows how amazingly strong they are. To be able to share all that you have overcome to people you might only be acquaintances with is such an admirable trait that I wish I had more of. 

Through all this, it's important to know that there are a lot of people dealing with mental health issues and you’re not alone. Talk to someone. Whether its a therapist, your mom, your best friend, it doesn’t matter. The reason I am getting through this is because I’ve had someone making sure I get through every day. As much as you feel alone, there is at least one person out there that wants to see you fight, you just gotta look and see who it is. Even though I am still fighting my battle with depression, I am on my way up and I’m figuring out how to be myself again. As someone once told me, “You’re not a mess. A mess gets cleaned up. You’re a puzzle. You just have to figure out how to put yourself back together,” and that is what I will continue to do.