Fight for Life

         Loneliness, moodiness, excessive sleep; these are all symptoms of depression, and they are all the things that have plagued my life since before I can remember.  I’ve never been diagnosed with depression, because I’ve never gone to talk to my doctor about it.  I’ve always kept these things inside, because I’ve been afraid to tell anyone about them ever since what happened in eighth grade.
         My friends and family think I’m a happy-go-lucky girl.  They think I have it all, that I’m perfect.  This is because I’ve always put up this facade.  I always acted like I was happy and having a good time, even if I wasn’t.  I sometimes even got myself to think that I was having a good day, even if it really wasn’t.  If I saw one of my friends in the hall I would smile and wave, even if for just a second, before I was pouting and sad.  I couldn’t let them to know what I was feeling.  In eighth grade, though, I got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore and had to talk to someone.
         One day, my friends Nicole, Debbie, Paige and I decided to go to a movie instead of the silly school dance that was going on that Friday evening.  Then, on the following Saturday, we were going to be going ice skating.  I was all for this, but then our friends Shannon, Katie, and Kristine invited themselves along.  I was more than a little upset with this, because I didn’t like Shannon or Katie.  I still went with the group and pretended to have fun.
         Friday night came and I was excited to hang out with my friends.  We went to Pizza Hut for supper before the movie.  I was having fun until Shannon showed up.  She started fooling around.  She would put salt in peoples’ drinks or put lots of parmesan cheese on peoples’ pizza when they didn’t want it. When everyone was done eating, we headed over to the movie theater, which was right across the parking lot.  At the movie theater, Shannon was throwing things like popcorn and ice at people.  I tried to pretend that I was having fun, but in reality, I was getting really annoyed with Shannon.  I could see that my friend Nicole was too, which made me even more mad.  After the movie I went over to Nicole’s house to spend the night.
The next morning, everyone met at Nicole’s house to go over to the skating rink.  I had brought the wrong pair of ice skates with me, so I had to share with Debbie.  We took turns wearing the skates.  The one without the skates would slide around on the ice in her boots.  I was having fun; just skating around, and then everyone started pairing off.  This is where the first problem occurred.  There was an odd number of us so one of us had to skate alone, and that one person was me.  Nicole skated with Shannon, Paige skated with Katie, and Sarah skated with Debbie.  Kristine didn’t go skating with us. Then Shannon took out her hot chocolate.  She had brought enough for each of us to have one scoop, but had brought tea for herself and then took three scoops for herself.  I didn’t think this was fair so I went out and skated by myself.
The next week in school I was a little depressed because of what had happened over the weekend.  I was also stressed out because of my classes.  One day, in homeroom, I couldn’t take it anymore so I asked my friend Nicole if I could kill myself.  She just kind of looked at me in shock, and then said no.  She went to one of the school councilors and told them about it.  Then the councilor called me into her office to talk to me about it.  I said that I wasn’t really thinking about it, I just wanted some attention because I felt like I was being ignored.  They had to call my parents and tell them about it though.  The councilor made it seem like the reason I felt this way was that my parents smoked.  They promised to stop.  I believed them, because I was still really trustful of people.
I did feel a little better after talking about it, and I thought I was cured.  I went on with my life and finished eighth grade.  Then I got to high school, and it got worse.  In ninth grade I went on my first date with this guy Andrew.  We went to my friend Paige’s Halloween party together.  At the party we played hide-and-go-seek.  We had to have partners because it was dark and it wasn’t one of the safest neighborhoods in town.  I was partners with Andrew.  When we were found we would go over to the rest of the group and wait for everyone else’s discovery.  He would push me on the tire swing in the backyard, or we would throw leaves at each other.  I thought we had had a lot of fun.  For the next couple of weeks in school, we would walk with each other around the halls before class and talk.
Then, about three or four weeks after the party, he stopped talking to me.  He just started ignoring me.  He would turn around and walk the other way if he saw me in the hall.  I began to feel lonely and depressed again.  I felt like it was my fault, like I had done something wrong to make Andrew stop liking me.  My friends all tried to cheer me up by saying that it wasn’t my fault.  It was his loss.  I was a great person, and if he couldn’t see that then he didn’t deserve my time.  I did eventually get over him, but that was the beginning of the downward slope of my high school career.
Ninth grade was nothing compared to my later years of high school.  I eventually figured out that my parents were still smoking.  They tried really hard to hide it, but nothing worked.  There would be a phone call for them and so I would go looking for them.  I would find them out front of the house smoking.  I would smell it in my mom’s car when I got in.  There was no hiding it.  This was the least of my problems though.  I had to keep my grades up, because if I didn’t, I would be letting my family down; I couldn’t do that.  I also had to make sure that no one ever found out about what I was feeling inside.  I had to keep that inside, because I didn’t want my friends and family to worry about me.  They had their own things to worry about.
My worst year was my senior year.  Everyone said this was going to be the best year.  I was excited because I couldn’t wait for it to get all better, for it to get easier.  It didn’t get easier though.  I took harder classes because I wanted a challenge.  I thought I could handle it, but I really couldn’t.  The stress eventually got to me.  I started to go back down into that deep, dark hole that I knew so well.
Everyone thought I was doing better though.  My friends all thought I was getting along with life so well.  I acted happy when I was around them, which wasn’t very often.  They all worked so they were always busy.  I usually spent my weekends up at my family’s cabin.  If I did stay in town on the weekends, I would spend the weekends sitting at home on the computer, or watching television down in my room.  I felt all alone and left out of the loop.  If something was going on in one of my friends’ lives, I didn’t find out about it until a week or more after it happened.
When prom came around I decided just to go with my friends because I didn’t want to try to get a date.  The week before prom I found out two of my friends Debbie and Shannon (whom I was really good friends with at this point) were going to have dinner parties.  Shannon was having her own for, Kristine, Nicole, and herself, because the three of them were mad at Sarah Nelson, who was going to be at Debbie’s party.  They had been planning these parties for a long time before I found out.  I called Debbie and asked her about her party.  She told me she had meant to call me, but had gotten to busy.  She also told me some of the people she was having over.  I finally decided to go to Shannon’s because Debbie was having a lot of people that I didn’t know, and I was really mad at her for not calling me and telling me about it earlier.  We had been best friends since first grade, so I felt very betrayed when she hadn’t invited me.
My senior year I took psychology.  My high school offered three levels of Psychology and I took all three of them during my senior year.  During my Psychology Two class we had to get into groups and make a video to teach the rest of the class about a group of disorders.  My group had a variety of mental disorders, such as depression and conversion disorder.  The week we started filming just happened to fall on the week of suicide awareness week.  This was also one of the worst weeks of my senior year because I had fallen very, very deep into my hole of depression.  Every morning I woke up feeling like death knelt over me.  I hated life so very much and just wanted to end it all.  We also had one of our biggest exams in psychology the week before and I had failed it.  It was the first test I had failed all year.  I had been doing very well; in fact my grade point average had gone from a 3.6 the year before to a 4.0 at the end of the first term and had stayed that way the entire year.  I felt a lot of pressure from my parents to go in and retake the test and to pass it.  I also felt a lot of pressure from my group members to retake the test because we couldn’t start filming until I passed it.
I did pass the retake, but that didn’t do much to raise my sprits.  I still felt like I wanted to die.  Just about every morning I would wake up and think I was worthless, that no one wanted me around.  Several times I tried to kill myself.  I would wrap my hands around my throat and squeeze.  I would never be able to hold it for very long though, because when I couldn’t breath I would get scared and I would let go.  Then I would think that I could do it when I got home because then I would have time to plan it out at school and I could write a suicide note.  I would always forget about it when I got home though.  I survived my senior year and graduated 56th in my class.
The summer after my senior year was good.  I had a lot of genuine fun.  I took a class at Saint Benedicts, through this program I was in, which was called Upward Bound.  I would spend the week at Saint Benedicts and go home on the weekends.  There were other kids there for the same reason.  Most of them were still in high school, but the only ones in my class were those of us who had just graduated.  During the program we would take class during the day and then have activities at night.  Every Wednesday, we would go on a field trip, usually to a college for a tour.  We were there for two months, and the second to last week of the program they took those of us who had graduated form high school, and those who were going to be seniors, to Seattle.  I met a lot of new people the program, and am still friends with a lot of them.
The month of August was a lonely month for me.  Most of my friends still had jobs, or were gone on trips, so I sat at home and watched television or read a book.  Then I came to college, and I thought for sure that everything would get better.  That was a very wrong hypothesis.  At first it was fun.  I met a lot of new people and made a lot of new friends right off the bat.  I met this girl named Renata, who is from Cosmos, which is only a half hour away form Willmar, Minnesota. We got along right away.  I found out my friend Paige, from high school, was on the floor beneath me with Renata.  I thought this was going to be great because the three of us where like three peas in a pod.
After orientation week was over and classes started, everything went downhill.  I quickly figured out that college was not going to be anything like high school.  It was going to be a lot more work and I wasn’t ready for this reality.  I got stressed out really fast and really easily.  I started to get behind in some of my classes and started slipping down into the very familiar hole of depression.  By now it was so familiar to me that I knew exactly what to do when this happened.  That was to keep everything bottled up and hidden.  I also started to put on my mask of happiness.  I started pretending that I was having a good day when really I was screaming for help inside.
I found a way to help keep this loneliness away though.  I found a boyfriend.  His name was Ben Anderson, and he had been in my orientation club.  We started dating the first full week of classes.  I thought that I was in love with him.  I loved being with him.  I loved the way he made me feel inside.  He made me feel whole and complete; he also made me feel safe and warm.  The most important thing, though, was that he made me feel loved and wanted.  Sure my friends did this too, but he did it in a way that they couldn’t.  Everyday, I couldn’t wait to see him, to get to spend time with him.
We dated for three weeks, and then out of the blue on a cold and cloudy Saturday afternoon, he told me he wanted to break up.  I was crushed.  Everything I had felt when Andrew rejected me came rushing back, only this time it was ten times worse because I was in love with Ben, and I thought he had been in love with me.  I went immediately looking for my friends for comfort.  I spent the rest of the weekend crying over him.  I started slipping even farther down into my hole of depression.
I cried over Ben for the next two weeks or so.  Nothing I did seemed to make it better.  I tried talking to him to try to figure out what had happened.  I kept thinking, “What did I do wrong?  Was there something I could have done to have kept us together?”  I wanted to know but he wasn’t going to give me any answers.  Then Ben stopped going to classes, and eventually dropped out of school.  That actually helped me get over him, because he wasn’t there for me to talk to.
This didn’t help my depression though.  It got better for a little bit, but then mid terms came around and I had two speeches to write and a couple of tests to study for.  I got stressed out and was ready for a break.  Over mid semester break, I decided to push everything else off to the side, and worry about getting sleep and relaxing.  When I got back, though, all the pressures and homework I had pushed off the side came rushing back, sending me into a tail spin of reality.  I was pushed back down into my hole and this time, there was no getting out of it for me.
One week into the new block I started to feel the pressure of my new classes along with the pressure from my old classes.  On Halloween night, I had gone back up to my room after trick-or-treating with Paige and Renata at Brown Hall.  I was feeling extremely lonely and worthless.  I started thinking about how easy it would be to just grab my bottle of Tylenol off my shelf and take the whole thing.  I wouldn’t feel any more loneliness.  So what I did was I climbed up into my bed, grabbed my journal from under my pillow and started writing a suicide note.  When I was done I put it away and climbed back down.  I went over to my desk and took the bottle of pills.  I sat down at my desk staring at the bottle in my hands.  I then got up and went down to Paige’s room, taking the bottle with me.  I handed her the bottle and told her to hide it from me.  We hugged and cried, and then she told me that I should spend the night in her room.
The next day she took me to the counseling center to make an appointment to see one of the counselors.  She has been keeping a close eye on me, making sure I feel wanted and loved.  I haven’t told my parents about this yet.  I just haven’t found the right time.
I’m still not “cured”, if you can ever be cured of depression.  I still feel lonely and worthless sometimes.  These feelings will probably never go away until I go see a doctor and get something for my depression.  There is one thing I do know though and that is: as long has I have the support of my friends and family, I will keep on fighting for life.