I should have included a trigger warning in my previous post, so I apologize for that. I want to give a trigger warning to anybody dealing with sexual assault/harassment and/or suicide for this post.
This is a quick and dirty guide to my brain. I'll preface it with this: I'm not a particularly great person but thankfully I only live inside my head, so I'm not that much of a threat to anything outside of it.
My first major depressive episode I myself triggered not long after I transferred to Bard College. I found out that I got blackout drunk and sexually harassed one of my new friends after she told me what I had done. I still have no idea how bad it actually was, but what I knew was the obvious effect it had on her and her friends which I honestly believe counts for much more than what may have happened.. I felt incredibly guilty and ashamed about this that I isolated myself. Because of my obsessive and unforgiving mind, I couldn't get any sleep because of intrusive thought patterns that involved myself raping or stopping somebody from sexually assaulting women in my life that I cared about. I was actually more disgusted with the savior fantasies than anything else--they were repulsive. A sane person, in my estimation, would have taken stock of what I had done, how to avoid it, and how to move forward. I hounded my victim until she took my apology. It still makes me sick to my stomach when I look back on it. Even though I made amends with her and we have had a couple of meetings long after the fact where we talked about it, I haven't really forgiven myself for it. I still feel like I am predatory when it comes to women--which is a huge issue I'm trying to work through.
What helped was by joining an English as a Second Language program, which I continued to participate in until I graduated. It added some structure to my life and was purely a community service. It was an hour or so where I could live outside my head and actually do some tangible good. It was generally a good day whenever I helped tutor. Throughout my college career, committing to ESL helped pull me out of some pretty dark places.
The second major depressive episode was the next semester. The day the semester started, one of the few friends I actually had, Jamie, committed suicide. He was the only person who I opened up to about what I did. He was a smoker and I think part of the reason why I picked it up was to capitalize my time with the guy. I ate breakfast with the guy almost every day. After his funeral, I got closer to some of his friends and his brother. I still consider them to be two of the best friends I've ever had. However, I feel that I allowed myself to enter a co-dependent relationship to members of his group--just this sponge who absorbed their pain and anger on an almost daily basis. I started counseling and by the end of that semester, I was still angry and strung-out, but felt like I had some form of perspective and peace with the whole thing.
This was my junior year. The first two months of the second semester of my senior year, I had my third major depressive episode. This one was unique because it wasn't really triggered. It was partly due to the anniversary of Jamie's suicide, but even when he actually died, I wasn't ready for the sheer paralysis and abject misery of the this episode. I spent the month of January and most of February that year in my bed. I grit my teeth, punched my mattress, had crying jags in my pillow. I would fantasize about dying or killing myself. The only times I stepped outside was to smoke a cigarette, go to class, or get some food. I lost a lot of weight since I would forget to eat. Anytime I was outside my dorm room, I felt like I was suffocating. I managed to hide how horribly I felt very well, but dissembling is exhausting. It is so fucking exhausting. My friends Maria and Steven invited me out for my birthday, which I had actually forgotten was happening. For that brief period, I really felt less alone and normal and kind of happy, though I think my speech patterns were obviously stilted and jagged. When I went back to my room, I sobbed like fucking crazy. A few days later, I started to pick myself back up, forced myself to be more social, and started to behave like a real member of fucking society. For the rest of the school year, it was a battle to not succumb to my bed. I was still filled with a huge amount of anger and resentment (especially to anybody who even remotely laughed in my direction) and I desperately, desperately, wanted to graduate and get the fuck out of there. I consider this period of my mental illness history to be my personal low thus far.
I was depressed throughout civilian life after graduation, moving to my parent's house in North Carolina, throughout the fifty or so unanswered resumes for menial work, getting a job by sucking up my pride and asking for my dad's help. I had an appendectomy that had gone septic and a day after I got out Maria called to tell me that my roommate at Bard, Steven (not the same Steven from above), committed suicide. I was in so much physical pain that I couldn't even cry when I learned how he did it. I wrote a letter to his family, but was so insecure about it that I saved it to drafts and it deleted over time. There is a Michel deCerteau quote that I paraphrase as, "The first death is the only death". This definitely figured into my emotional state with Steven's death--I was mostly numb to the emotions. I had experienced them before and I could feel the coping mechanisms click into place. I didn't feel like I had a major depressive episode then, but with Steven's death, I feel as something essential that I can never get back shut down inside me. I'm trying to find it because I feel as though I'm a less compassionate person without it.
October last year was when I felt myself sliding back into bed, began yelling at my car, argue with my parents for no real discernible reason (probably because I'm almost 25 and still living with them. I feel like my financials are now in order so I should become a normal soon). My video game addiction got pretty bad (and is still pretty bad). My suicidal ideation got almost unbearable. It's funny when you work through the ludicrous logic of it, but it sucks when you're actually on the highway looking at the other lane or when you wake up imagining a gun against your temple. That's when I started on generic Celexa and began hunting for therapists. Celexa, by the way, has been huge for me. I'll get to that at a later date.
This is all stuff off the top of my head. There were some experiences and some beautiful moments throughout that I might not have touched on since I'm not in an emotional state to sort through the memory pile. Sorry that this post wasn't that funny. Next post, I'll talk about where I want to be and how I'll try to get there.
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