I Spent Years Feeling Like Something Was Wrong With Me. Finally, I Heard The 3 Words I Needed To Hear.
The author. Courtesy of Isabelle Stillman
I struggled with depression for seven years before I got medicated. Part of this delay was because the first time I tried counseling, the nice lady at my college health center listened for a minute then said, “Well, it sounds like you have a lot to be grateful for.” Part of it was because my family, like so many others, didn’t talk much about mental health. Part of it was because, although I knew I was sad, I didn’t know I was sick.
Mental illnesses have been stigmatized for centuries. Evil spirits, hysteria, witchcraft, divine retribution — you name it, mental illness has been attributed to it. But in the last few decades, our culture has consciously put many of these stigmas to bed. Millennials and Gen Zers are markedly more open about their mental health than previous generations. We tend to understand that anyone can struggle emotionally. We don’t pathologize, we normalize. We don’t label, we view holistically. We don’t call people “mentally ill,” we refer to their “mental health issues,” “challenges” or “struggles.”
In almost every way, this is a beautiful triumph of the modern era, but in one very important way, it’s not working for me.
My depression started sophomore year of college, with extended bouts of darkness, lethargy and despair. However, these bouts, I told myself, could easily be explained circumstantially. I’m a heady person, who made heady friends and had heady conversations. I was an English major, which meant constant analysis and revision — skills that became so habitual in the classroom they began to infiltrate my daily life — and a healthy dose of Kafka, who can draw the sunniest person into the depths of despair. I attended a fancy college that often felt like an indulgence, which inspired feelings of guilt and confusion. After my visit to the campus counseling center, I also felt shame for not being thankful enough for my blessings. Add all this up, and it was no surprise I was sad.
My depression deepened senior year, which also seemed logical — seniors often find themselves daunted by the future, afraid of the “real world,” or torn up about college relationships.
When my periods of darkness continued after college, part of me started to wonder if they had a name, but there were so many people — friends included — who actually struggled with depression. I wasn’t sure if what I was experiencing qualified. I told myself I was just an intense person in my chaotic 20s trying to figure life out. My therapist seemed to agree. She used diagnostic words to describe temporary situations — “a time of depression, a moment of anxiety” — like they were experiences that occurred in isolation, and could be conquered by shifting my mindset and using problem-solving skills.
In 2020, these “experiences” hit me harder. I moved to Los Angeles in June, started teaching high school, and began attending grad school online. Amid all of these transitions, there were days I couldn’t get off the couch and days I wept without reason. Still, I told myself, everyone was sad during lockdown, so, of course I was, too! But when my sadness didn’t abate for months, I began to suspect that what I was feeling wasn’t something everyone was going through.
During the summer of 2021, in a particularly low time, I cried to my then-boyfriend, now-husband. “What is happening to me? What is this?”
“It’s depression,” he said, gently squeezing my hands. “You have depression.”
My sobs stopped abruptly.
“Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
As obvious as it seems looking back, at the time I still wasn’t convinced. The label felt unearned, like a guesstimate.
Later that summer, during a weekend with friends, I had another revelation. As we got ready for dinner, one friend, M, said she’d forgotten her Zoloft. Another friend, L, offered her a Zoloft from her own supply, but the dose was bigger than M’s. Yet another friend offered M a dose of her Zoloft, and M, relieved, took two of them.
I watched this interaction thinking, Wait, all these people are medicated? What about me?
I went home and made an appointment with a psychiatrist.
Between 2021 and 2024, I took my meds and worked with an incredible therapist. I began to refer to my “low” episodes as depression, albeit tentatively and self-consciously. I learned to recognize how they came on — a slowing of my body, a “graying” feeling in my brain — and to stave them off by taking a break from work, going for a walk or taking a bath. My boyfriend learned, too, and helped get me outside or set up with a good book when I started to go catatonic.
I left teaching, went back to my first love, writing, and got a little better. I made new friends, spent more time with family, and got a little better. My boyfriend and I got engaged, then married, moved, and started new jobs. I kept up my self-care, therapy, and medication throughout this time. The freedom and ability to do so was and is not lost on me. I had the flexibility and means to take work breaks and spend time on hobbies. So many people who suffer from depression don’t have what they deserve: the time and support to care for themselves, not to mention access to mental health care or the funds to secure it.
Things started to get busier last spring. I self-cared less and worked more. I overcommitted in my new job and was pitching my first novel to agents instead of writing it, so my creative time dwindled. I knew things were going downhill, but I didn’t stop. When I felt my body weakening and my brain fogging, I tried to rest and recuperate but, finally, it all caught up to me.
My family, friends, therapists, husband and I have been calling it “what happened in June,” but, in plain language, I had an experience of suicidality. It came on suddenly, and quickly poured out of my mouth like an old song I knew all the words to: I didn’t want to live anymore.
The days that followed exist down an endless hallway in my memory, locked behind an unmarked door. They are vivid and visceral to my husband, but faint and distant to me.
“That’s because you weren’t there,” he says, which is true. I had vacated my body.
We went to the hospital. My husband took off work. My mother flew in. Friends and family sent love and support. The next week, I increased my meds and my therapy sessions. Once I was relatively stable, we analyzed what triggered the crisis — work stress, fatigue, isolation — and brainstormed ways to improve it. We shaped my days around things that made me happy, or, at least, kept me from being sad. I worked in the garden. I sat in the sun. I joined a church and a walking club, started writing a new novel, bought a bike, saw my friends. I worked less. I called loved ones more. I took my mental health more seriously than I ever had, because this time I knew it was dangerous. And I got better.
And then I got worse.
Halfway through August, even with my tripled medications and my lifestyle changes, it came back. One Tuesday morning, sitting at my desk, I felt it descend — the grayness, the fog, the slowing. It was like someone had hit “power off.”
I was surprised — and frustrated. I was no longer a heady college kid or a flailing 20-something. I had worked so hard to unlearn the thought patterns that got me down and the habits of my lifestyle that sucked me dry. I had worked so hard to be happy.
And, yet, there I was — unable to get off the couch. Unable to feel happiness.
That day, I had a session with one of my therapists. I told her how I was feeling, and the worries I had that no matter what I did, these days would keep coming — that something about me was wrong.
“Well, let’s not pathologize it,” she said.
Two days later, I met with my other therapist. I told her I still felt low and that I wanted to be normal.
“You are normal,” she said.
That same day, I met with my psychiatrist (I swear, I’m trying, so hard).
“For someone with your mental health… issues,” he said before discussing dosages.
That night, I vented to my husband that all of the normalizing — the not pathologizing — was making me feel like my mental health had to do with my personality, not my brain. As if it was just who I was — not a sickness, not a disorder, just me.
“All I want,” I told him, “is for someone to tell me I’m sick.”
I want to pathologize this. I want to call it an illness. I want to know that what happens to me is not normal. Because if it is normal? If nothing’s wrong? Then what I have is a character flaw, and I’ll have to keep walking and gardening and self-caring until I’ve fixed who I am.
But if I am sick — if I have a mental illness, not an “issue,” or a “challenge,” or a “struggle” — then I don’t have to be mad at myself. I don’t have to fix my personality, rue my emotional range, mastermind each day to avoid potential sadness. When my illness flares up, it’s not because I’ve lost a war with my demons, it’s because this is how my brain works.
Isn’t this the point of destigmatizing in the first place? To help people feel less shame, less guilt, less personal responsibility for the ways their brains work? I understand that normalizing divergent experiences is an attempt to be supportive, but it’s not supportive to gloss over or sugarcoat the very real medical issues people face.
If someone had taken my episodes seriously — medically — when I first experienced them, I could have started getting better at 19. If our culture addressed sadness, worry and lethargy with more discernment and less fear of insult, we could separate the person from the diagnosis, treat the diagnosis, and let the person be.
I’m doing better now, and I intend to keep improving. Part of what’s helped is getting clearer about what is actually wrong with me.
In a recent session, I asked my therapist about my official diagnosis. She pulled out the DSM, and we read through the types of depression: dysthymia, substance-induced, persistent, etc.
“But — ” I said, “What are these? Syndromes? Circumstances? Experiences? What is depression?”
She closed the DSM and looked at me. She seemed hesitant, and I wondered — I still wonder — why we’re so afraid to use the words.
Finally, she said the three words I’d been waiting to hear: “It’s an illness.”
Isabelle Stillman is a writer from St. Louis, Missouri, currently based in Long Beach, California. She is the editor of december, a literary magazine, and is currently querying her first novel.
Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at [email protected].
Related…
Source link
#Spent #Years #Feeling #Wrong #Finally #Heard #Words #Needed #Hear