What My Mother Did
Location
I told my dad yesterday that I've been depressed since age nine. Of course at the time I was unaware of how I felt. I told him at age twelve I started getting worse. I told him that I hurt myself for the first time then. At age thirteen we had to take a suicide survey. I told a close friend that I wanted to kill myself in the past and she asked me:
"Do you still want to?"
I lied and said no. I lied on the survey, too.
At age fourteen I had a best friend who understood me and I could tell every emotion to, I even recognized that I was depressed, but we slowly split apart because I was trying to better myself and made the mistake of dropping myself from the past.
At age fifteen I fell harder than I had before.
I didn't tell anybody this time, and I let it build inside of me.
It took months for it to reach its peak, but when it finally did, it was an avalanche of emotion. Relief. Scars,
Months of long sleeves, bloody sheets and distant communication. Isolation.
I visited the hospital soon afterwards. I was getting better. I loved myself.
At age sixteen I thought I fell in love. My medication stopped working, I started seeing things, and I became distant again.
That summer we moved. We got away from what I thought caused my thoughts.
My mom asked me thirty minutes into the drive.
"Why were you hurting yourself?"
I gave her a blank stare.
That summer, my own mother became distant from me. She stopped caring. Understanding. Empathizing. Loving.
And once again, did I fall into the deep despair.
Anger consumed me. I spent my nights in the basement biting tongue with pathetic tears forming in my eyes. The shadows were my only friends. The ones that woke up next to me in the morning, and the ones that would play on the stairs and keep me up at night, they made me feel less alone.
Therapy was a necessity since the year before, but for different reasons this time,
Reasons that were irrational to my own mother, my own family.
Once a week, I spent fifty minutes complaining about my life to a stranger. And that was the only time I felt happy, in those four months.
Nine months past age sixteen, I am happy. I am not in therapy, and I am not on medication. I can say, my anxiety is worse, and the things I see don't keep my company anymore, I have friends to do that for me, and even a lover. Nine months past age sixteen, and I know what love really feels like. I still get depressed from time to time, and I still can't concentrate, but nothing beats the fact that I am happy underneath it all.