Things are changing, and it's times like these when I find myself reflecting. On everything that's happened. The absolute mess that's been my life for the last 7 odd years, one catastrophe after another, setback after setback. I'm sitting here listening to the playlist of songs that usually make me cry, but now, I'm listening to them not as a catharsis, but as a way of looking back on the situations that make them so painful to hear.
All starting with the depression that hit me when I was about 13/14. I became truly aware of it at the beginning of Year 10, a few months after I had turned 14, but have an isolated memory of deciding to starve myself to death the summer before. I don't remember anything of the surrounding time, I don't remember being unhappy, but by god I must have been. I totally forgot that incident for a good couple of years, and it sure did disturb me when I remembered about it. I mean, how can you forget something like that?
Well, I know now that my memory got quite good at protecting me. I made a real concerted effort to recover from the depression and the self harm starting with the new year of Year 10, going into 2004. I investigated Buddhism as a system of existing, and kept records of things that made me happy. During the summer that followed I got to know my now best friend, C, and helped her through some difficult issues with her parents. But I hadn't really recovered. That autumn, C phoned me up one night in October and told me that she had self-harmed. I snapped. I fell right back into the habit, blaming myself for C's suffering. Before she knew me she would never have even dreamed of it, so it seemed logical to deduce that it was all my fault. 2005 rolled around, and the beginning of that year was one of the hardest times of my life. January to April is now completely missing from my memory, it's just a big old black hole. I have a few odd memories that I know must come from that time, but I can't place them anywhere within it. I was extremely suicidal, in a way that I'd never been before, and terrified of myself. I was failing to support C in the way that she needed, and I knew I was a hopeless case for her to try and help me.
I went to the GP eventually, and was referred to the local counselling service, which resulted in 2 horrific hours of being laid open on an emotional operating table while a complete stranger pokes around and forces you to reveal your darkest secrets. Needless to say, I lied a lot. Reflexively, in self-defense. After that, I didn't speak face-to-face to anyone about anything for a good 2 years.
During those 2 years, I developed my eating disorder. And suffered in complete silence, for fear of a repeat of anything that happened in those 2 hours at the counselling service. I wasn't able to see people as supportive or friendly, even well-meaning. The never-ending cycle of the eating disorder nearly drove me mad. Losing weight was the only thing that made me feel happy, that gave me a sense of self-worth; but I knew it was a stupid thing to do, and the two sides of my mind were in all-out warfare for the whole of 6th form.
In Year 13, something else came along. A friend of mine who had gone to a different 6th Form suffered a serious bereavement, losing all 3 of her grandparents in as many weeks. She sank into a suicidal depression and would rely on nobody except me. I, of course, was in no fit state to support even myself, let alone anyone else, and the pressure was crushing. I did everything I could, but nothing seemed to make any difference. Having to talk someone out of killing themselves when it's what you want to do yourself, is no small feat. No small trauma. And yet, throughout everything, I had hope. I had something to hold onto.
That hope was university. Freedom at last. Studying nothing but my favourite subject, living independently. I knew that so long as I could survive school, I'd be alright. My main weapon against my eating disorder was the importance of my study, and I stubbornly refused to surrender my grades to a stupid disease. I would finally escape the suffocating existence I had been trapped in ever since the middle of secondary school, following a daily routine I hated and having what felt like no control over my life.
Finally, it came. I shed no few tears at the thought that I had made it: I had survived the worst and made it to university. And then first year happened. I was physically ill for almost the entire year, having screwed my body up completely with the eating disorder, and the course was not what I had signed up for. I was working a 60-hour week doing work that felt pointless, and the depression was ever-present. My hope, my guiding light, had failed me. Betrayed me. Instead of freedom, I had just moved into yet another soul-destroying routine that left me no room to be myself, to breathe. I ended up going completely numb, unable to take the resulting pain.
Over the summer, I began to thaw out. I would find myself crying at stupid things on TV, just because the emotion was coming back and had to surface somehow. A tiny glimmer of hope reignited somewhere in me, because after everything going so horribly wrong, I had another chance. I was moving abroad to Russia, where I could start completely afresh. New house, new host family, new friends, new language, everything.
And guess what? It turned out to be one of the hardest years yet. I was put with a landlady who was verbally abusive and gave me no space to myself, shouting at me especially at meal times - just the time when I needed to be left to myself to cope with food. Xenophobia hit me hard; I was already self-conscious and knowing that anywhere I went I would get stared at for being foreign was something I just did not know how to deal with. I hacked 3 months with that landlady, then finally cracked when I returned from the Christmas holidays at home. The guilt was overwhelming, because I knew how much she needed my rent money, but I just couldn't stay there. My new host family were lovely, and we are still in touch, but really what I needed was to go home to recover. My depression was on full whack, the eating disorder came straight back where it had been under control, and spiralled quickly. I was trapped in a hostile environment that gave me nowhere to escape what was going on in my head. I hated going out because of the unfriendly attention, and I hated being alone because all I could do was dwell on how miserable I was. The weather took a turn for the worse and we didn't even see the sun for pushing 3 months - imagine the slightly low feeling that a grey sky inspires, and then times it by 90. I became claustrophobic and started to have panic attacks daily when I went into the tiny classroom we had been assigned at the local university. It was during that time that I realised about the gap in my memory from 2005, and also when I started to get a few glimpses of it back. Some of the flashbacks were horrific, lasting for hours, even involving visual hallucinations. I broke down completely. The only thing that kept me even vaguely sane were internet forums where I could connect with people from back home who understood my mental condition and could offer what support they were able.
Now, I tend to think of things that happened pre-Russia as 'before I broke'. I came home a changed person. My eating disorder was nothing like it had ever been, and my weight had dropped significantly. My family found out, and the process of getting treatment started. I was forced to let my university tutors know what was going on, because my depression was affecting my academic performance for the first time in my life. What had changed was hope. Before Russia, I had hope - even after having it crushed so cruelly in first year, it did come back the summer afterwards. But after Russia, it was gone completely. I gave up on hoping for anything. I didn't just lose it - I actively abandoned it. All it had ever done was betray me. I knew that I had to pursue treatment, but had no motivation to carry on or persevere with life. The only reason I've been alive for the last almost two years is that I don't want to hurt anyone by my suicide. If other people weren't affected, and it was entirely down to me, I'd be long gone by now.
Life since then has been a bit of a blur. Things didn't improve even with treatment; none of the medication we tried worked. I started doing CBT for my eating disorder and made some progress, but the depression stayed and was hampering my full recovery.
And then, after all that, after living without hope or happiness - and it doesn't really matter how long for, because any amount of time spent with no hope at all feels an eternity - something happened.
I tried a medication called buproprion, meant to boost my energy and help my concentration. And it did. After a year and a half of trying everything the medical world had to offer, being passed from specialist to specialist, something actually worked. One day it occurred to me that I had been feeling a little better for the last couple of weeks. And what that meant? That things might...might be starting to end. The hideous mess of a life that I've been living since early adolescence might be finally changing, towards something bearable. Something that doesn't mean suffering every day, levels of emotion so extreme that the only way out is to harm myself and get lost in the pain or starve it into numbness.
I feel myself moving towards seeing the last 7 years not as a continuing event, but as a completed event. Having given up on life, and hope, I may just have been proved wrong. Maybe there is light after all.
