No, I’m not back – I’m here to tell you why I’m not back, and what’s happened since I last posted over two months ago. I started to feel increasingly shaky and anxious over the week before I went back to Uni Town – I spent a lot of time mousing around P’s house, small and scared and trying not to be, trying to work. I worried P a lot when I admitted that it was willpower and not just a lack of appetite that stopped me from eating, one really fun evening, that. Then we went back up to Uni Town – several hundred miles away from one another. He had his life, I had mine, such as it was, but I felt very much like I was starting over. Very few friendships from first year were ones I wished to maintain, my housemates were all new, and I was back in the first year with a whole new year group. Then I came down with the fresher’s flu and missed a week of classes. I was feeling lonely and unattractive and stupid and fragile and out of place in fundamental ways; feelings I could hardly describe. I was waking up in a panic before seven most nights, hardly sleeping inbetweenwhiles, tightly sprung and weird and paranoid, and everyone could see it. P and I arranged for me to come down for the weekend but I was dreading it, I was so nervous, and I wasn’t entirely sure he sounded like he really wanted me there – which I guess was all down to nerves on his part too, his continuing insecurity about whether this was a relationship he really wanted (to be fair he was having to text me three times a day to check I was actually eating anything, I was in something of a state about, well, everything, really).
So I went to see him, and we were a bit subdued at first but then we went out for dinner and it was lovely. I felt secure and happy and beautiful and we had a lovely evening, wandering back through the city at night which was beautiful, stopping for the strongest (and one of the nicest) cider I have ever tasted, and we went back to his… and then I woke up at six, lay there for hours tossing and turning, in a strange mood, and P woke up and I just felt worse and worse until we had some stupid argument which was all based around him wanting me to give my honest opinion on something and me being quite unable to do so, and then we started to talk about that. I remember saying that I honestly couldn’t see any way out of how I was feeling at that time, and I didn’t think I could take it any more, and he asked me what did I mean by that, and I know what we were both thinking, and I simply couldn’t give any kind of an answer, because I would have either been lying to make us both feel better (and knowing it) or telling the horrifying truth.
The thing about how I was feeling by this point was that usually in the past my depression has been fairly passive – it’s taken it out of me, left me completely uncaring. This was an overriding sense of panic that had been going on for weeks and wasn’t really familiar, at least not in the long term. So it was a fair point to moot that maybe we were making one another worse – and my reply, that yes, maybe we were, rather sealed the deal. We talked about it, batted the idea back and forth for a few hours, but it was a given from that point. So a cousin of mine, to whom I’m fairly close, collected me from P’s, and I went to hers and cried a lot, and got on the train back to Uni Town the next day, and spent a week trying to spend as little time as possible on my own, talking to a lot of people and praying a lot and just doing my best to be OK and pull myself together. And when I say praying a lot, I really do mean it. I think God really dragged me out of this one, held me up when I couldn’t do it myself. I started to believe in God this time last year, but I think I’d been scared off, and then P encouraged me to rethink the matter, and I got to university and He became more important to me again. So I spent much of that week just praying – for myself, for P, that I could just keep going.
And then I went home for the weekend and it became increasingly obvious that how I was feeling had very little to do with P and everything to do with my continued complete lack of self-esteem, my loathing for myself and my place in my life and everything, really. I went for a walk with my parents on the Saturday morning and found myself sobbing in a field in the middle of nowhere because everything was so beautiful and because I hated myself and because I could finally see why that was the case. If you’re bullied all through school, if you can’t trust your friends in your formative years to be your friends from one minute to the next or to stand up for you when everyone else is doing their best to make you feel like the smallest and lowliest thing in existence; if you react against that by fighting the cliche and becoming the hard-drinking baby whore, the darling of the seedier, sadder side of the school over the road from the one you went to, but never truly liked for who you are, if you allow all of that to let you get into poisonous friendships where you are treated with a total lack of respect or dignity because you allow yourself to be walked over without expecting anything in return, if you judge yourself as either a nerd or a slut and feel the full force of those words used against you by yourself every day of your life, if you can’t see any of the good about you, then you’ll go on to have encounters like, well, you all know who I mean when I say ‘T’, you’ll go onto university and take a while to trust that the ‘cool’ people like you and so you’ll never quite let them in, and so it goes on, such that even when you are in actual fact no longer the socially isolated school pariah, nor the teenage binge-drinking whore, when you have friends who respect you, and you act in a way that deserves their love and respect, when you have (or had) a loving and supportive boyfriend, all of that is still going to have affected you, and it’s no surprise that actually you’ve spent years and years getting depressed on and off, but mainly on, recognisably since you were a small child but more and more up until this point.
So this was the breaking point I had been so scared of, and instead of holding a knife to my wrists or staring at the view stretching for metres below me, thank goodness I was standing in a field screaming and sobbing in a field with my parents piecing it all together frantically. I essentially didn’t stop crying for the next few days at all and it was rapidly obvious that I wasn’t going back to Uni Town any time soon. I found myself a counsellor, Rob, who was brilliant. I saw him that Tuesday, and again that Friday, and then every Friday after that for a few weeks, but not even half as long as I expected. I guess because I’d already figured out how I’d got to where I was: a combination of my relationship to my family; my originally-justifiable inability to truly trust my friends; the thoughts about myself that I’d only had reinforced throughout my life – that I was fundamentally unlikeable and only worthwhile if I had something to give – intelligence, my body, friendship above and beyond the call of duty, whatever it was; and the resulting feeling that I had no right to force my emotions upon anyone else, such that I couldn’t feel angry or show anger, I couldn’t have opinions, I could hardly cry, and my recourse was then to turn all those feelings inwards upon myself, rendering me, time and again, absolutely mute. I’d got to that point, and I could see what I had to change, I just needed some help to know how to do it, and Rob more than provided that. A new way of looking at myself and the situations I encountered. Whilst I was at home I was sent so many supportive messages from friends – especially church friends. Recommendations of Bible passages and assurances of prayer from many people, and I can’t thank them enough for that, because I feel that it really made a difference.
For me I can’t imagine how it could get worse; I know that for millions of others it gets far worse, that what is at most four or five years of this hopelessly unbalanced fight is nothing compared to the decades that many go through, that whatever effect it may have had upon my choices and my degree – who knows, I might actually be doing Medicine now or at Cambridge or something, but I’m not, and that is how it is – that there are other people out there who cannot work at all, who will never be able to have and care for their own children, who will perhaps never leave their parental home. There are others who never make it out of teenagerhood or young adulthood, there are people who do terrible things as a direct consequence of depression. I know I’ve got off lightly, but it was bad enough, more than.
I know this entry might seem like it’s a little P-centric – it certainly reads as if I had a bad break-up experience and decided to chalk it down to depression rather than heartbreak as that seems a little more justified. Believe me when I say that yes, I am happy to accept that our break-up was a catalyst for what came next, but a catalyst is all it was. I’d felt the build-up to this last crisis, in the same way that I’ve seen ever other big crisis coming from days away, before we broke up. Perhaps it would have happened that weekend if he hadn’t broken up with me instead. It was a complete breakdown, a shaking loose of everything that troubled me, the feeling, finally, that it made total narrative sense that I should feel like I did because of the experiences I’d had, of course you’d get depressed and have very little self-esteem and all the rest of it – but that whatever had happened to me in the past had no reason and no right to keep affecting me becuase in all other ways I’d made it clear – in the eyes of the world I was a talented, well-balanced young woman, pretty and agreeable and a good friend and a good person, and I had no reason to see myself any differently.
And so I have spent the last few weeks learning to do so. I’ve hugely cut down on my caffeine intake, I never did go in for the big break-up binge, the crazy nights, promiscuity, and probable smoking relapse, that I would have previously predicted for myself. I didn’t turn to the old friend I’d expected to for rebound sex with no strings, nor did I take the rebound fling when it was offered elsewhere. I did all the right things instead. I go to the gym regularly, I get up early and I go to bed reasonably early, most nights. I go out with friends, I go to church, I pray lots, and I feel closer to God and like a better person than ever before. I am trying to live the ‘right’ life, and loving it. I’ve got a lot more musically involved. I got into the Orchestra and the Chamber Choir here, no trouble at all. I’m expanding my friendship groups and having the confidence to accept invitations and to make suggestions and invitations of my own. I am eating three meals a day – possibly a little more than I should but I’m making up for it with the exercise and more importantly I’m not worrying too much about it. I am a changed person – I feel it, and more tellingly, everyone around me remarks upon it surprisingly often. I am one of the success stories. I don’t feel now that if I made a new acquaintance I would have to explain myself and my past in the way I might have used to after a certain degree of friendship had been reached. ‘I was ill in my first year, so I’m retaking some modules’, I’ll say, if asked why I’m doing what I’m doing. Or, if I feel it doesn’t matter, I’ll say that I am either a first- or a second-year, depending on context (yes, I’ve lived here for a while, or yes, I’ll be here in three years’ time). And if asked what kind of ill, I’ll say ‘it doesn’t matter now’ or something, and change the subject, or ‘oh, you know how it is’, and hope that either they do and it doesn’t matter to them either, or they absolutely don’t but wouldn’t like to ask. Because yes, it’s shaped how I got here, and it’s shaped who I am, but it absolutely does not affect what happens next.
This is a mammoth post. Here’s fervently hoping and praying it really is the last one, this time. I’m not sure what else needs saying about who I am, who I was, and how I got to this point. I’d like to say, one last time, that for me, a lot of the answer was in God, and that a year ago that’s something I would have never thought I’d say. And that I like being a grown-up – and perhaps this was the final, massive leap I needed to make, to take responsibility for myself. But to take responsibility for myself, I had to love rather than loathe myself, and I do. Fingers crossed, this is it. Best wishes.