This Isn't Depression

Reposting this older contribution, enjoy!

“I’m fine.” I think I’ve used that phrase about 300 times in the last month to describe how I’ve been feeling. Anytime someone asked me how I was doing that would be my go-to response, not because I really felt, but because I was afraid of what the answer might actually be.

I’ve been depressed for about 2 years, but I was unable to accept it until a few days ago. I’ve always been overly politically correct, because nobody wants to be called a racist or a homophobe for an inane comment, so I never used the word depressed to describe a mood. When I started to actually become depressed, I just kept telling myself I was just sad. The problem was that I was sad for a long time with very small gaps where I would forget about reality and just have actual fun; quite a few of those were while I wasn’t exactly sober. In any case, I didn’t think I had a mental illness, and therefore I just kept trying to maintain my outward appearance of normality.

It was about a year of feeling like my “normal” life had just become a play I was putting on perpetually with the world being my audience when I began to worry about a mental illness. I had become a different person entirely. I sealed off most of my emotions because I was afraid if I didn’t; all I would feel was sadness. I seemed like an arrogant, sarcastic, but fun-loving guy to everyone who met me, when deep down I was insecure and just wanted to talk this through with someone. To those of you going, “Why not talk about it with one of your friends?” It’s because none of my friends would be equipped to deal with this, and I don’t want them to see that I am broken.

I know there are things I can’t do, for instance I have the artistic ability of a blind giraffe, but I demanded perfection out of myself for anything I could muster. I would get furious at myself for a hooked golf shot, or letting someone down when they were counting on me to do something I should have been able to do, but in the last year and a half it has become a disease. I broke a locker in my locker room to a point where no one can open it and have dented a lamppost outside my school multiple times because I disappointed myself. I thought I needed to do everything perfectly solo and so I wouldn’t accept help with anything. This trait made it really hard to accept that I wasn’t perfect, I had a mental illness, and I needed help.

Over the last 3 months or so, things have gotten much worse; I find it hard to eat more than 5-6 meals a week and I am getting around 28 hours sleep on a good week. That’s when my friends started noticing something was wrong. One of my friends commented a week ago that he hadn’t seen me eat in a month, even though we spend lunch period together almost everyday. People started observationally diagnosing me with eating disorders which only provoked my frustration. So I tried to bottle that up. Then I couldn’t any more. I’d go days where I’d look down and appear angry or sad all day long. It became so difficult to seem happy to my friends, I was filled with so much emotional pain that I couldn’t let out for fear my friends would ditch me and I’d lose my manliness card.

I took to occasionally cutting myself to let out pain. I dulled a knife down to a point where I can cut my skin, but not go deep enough to leave a serious scar. I have a lot of cuts right now, but only about 3 scars. You’re probably thinking, “At this point you had to accept your depression.” Nope. I was just sad. I’d be fine. I was fine. Alas, this too was false. One day a friend of mine saw some of the cuts on my arm, and asked if he could help. I started to give him my knife over the school day and take it back at night. “Well then he must have known you were cutting yourself and figured out you had depression. So he said something and that’s when you accepted it, right?” A for effort, but again, no. He asked me why I had cuts on my arm so naturally I told him I fell into a thorny bush…in March. Yep, totally believable. Then he’d ask why I gave him my knife. Time for my stellar quick thinking skills to kick in again. “I need it in case I get mugged on the subway but if I get caught with it again they’ll take it from me whereas you’ll just get a warning,” I said in my most nonchalant voice. Man, people can be gullible if you say things convincingly enough.

As I said, at this point I was worried about depression, so I did the only logical thing and started taking various online depression tests. I was consistently scoring in the suffering from severe depression range. “So, you’ve had days where you don’t really talk to people, you just look sad and angry, you’ve cut yourself, you’re not sleeping or eating and you have online tests telling you that you have severe depression… if you still weren’t able to accept it yet, surely one of your friends got you to come to grips with it.” I’m afraid not.

Then the old phrase “it takes one to know one” became applicable to my life. The reason someone finally addressed it with me was because they recognized the wit used to deflect emotions; a system I had been using for 2 years. I wasn’t sure what was going to be harder, accepting I have depression or continuing to pretend I don’t. The answer is pretending. Accepting who you are is the only way to get better. I know it will be hard, but I have someone to help me through it, and now I can fight for myself again. If accepting that I have a problem is the first step to solving it, I’ve come at least that far. So, for the second time in my entire life, and the first time to more than one other person, here it is, I have depression.