I'm writing this on a Friday night, sitting in bed with wet hair after a shower. I tend to shower at night to keep my morning routine as low-maintenance as possible, as it was this morning, when I hit the snooze button a few times before getting dressed and heading straight out the door to work. I did some reading and went through my emails during my break, then finished up with my last student of the day and closed the tutoring center. I picked up some groceries and made pasta for dinner. It was an unremarkable day, but it was only possible because I took my pills this morning.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to "come out" about my depression, and I've worried for a while about whether that's an appropriate phrase for it, so much so that this post has been waiting in my drafts folder for nearly three months as I struggled to find better words. After all this time, those are still the best words I have to describe swallowing my fear of the consequences as I share a part of myself that I no longer want to hide and hope that I'm met with understanding. Forgive me for taking so long to say anything; I spent a long time trying to admit it to myself first.
Every doctor I've seen has asked, first of all, "When did you begin to feel this way?" The neat answer is late 2013, while I was enrolled at the University of York for my Masters; the messy answer is that I've felt this way for a very long time, and the origins of my depression are as inscrutable to me as the origins of the universe. By the time I first tentatively sought help in January 2014, I had already forgotten what I had ever felt like before I felt "that way," and I had started to doubt that I would ever feel any other way. I went to my university's counseling services, where I leaked a steady stream of tears for an hour as I confessed all the ways I had ceased to function. Basic tasks – showering, cooking, getting dressed, washing the dishes – became daunting obligations that I increasingly avoided. Speaking to colleagues, professors, potential friends made me feel small and unworthy of their notice, so I withdrew from social contact and watched relationships develop around and without me. The thought of leaving the confines of my room, let alone the house, paralyzed me at the edge of my bed, unable to face the outside world. I ate too little and slept too much, hoping that if I simply waited long enough before waking up, the knots in my stomach and the fogginess in my brain would have passed, but it never did. Worst of all, my work suffered. The one thing I had come to do – earn a degree – became impossible as the days passed and my books remained unopened, my notebooks blank, and my desire to engage with anything other than the nothingness of sleep completely extinguished. I requested an extension on both of my autumn term papers, and ultimately turned in two essays that I should have been too ashamed to submit – but by that point, I had lost the capacity to feel shame or any other real emotion at all.
I started seeing a local doctor, a general practitioner who specialized in student health. (Thanks, NHS!) I cried in his office the first day too, because he used the words I'd been afraid to acknowledge: "Depression." "Generalized anxiety." "Cognitive impairment." "Mental illness." He wore a suit jacket and silver-rimmed glasses and I trusted him implicitly when he assigned to me terms I had previously only studied in textbooks. He gave me a diagnostic questionnaire to bring with me at a later appointment, but he also prescribed medication immediately, because it didn't really matter whether I checked "Sometimes," "Often," or "All The Time" for symptoms that were already obvious in my pathetic expression. Those first pills didn't do much, at least not more than I could have skeptically written off as the placebo effect at work, nor did the second round at a higher dosage. I hung on, dully going through the motions of being a student while waiting for a light to break through the clouds. Switching to a different medication almost immediately effected a slight but noticeable change, as if I'd been trapped in a dark room with my eyes squeezed shut but had the courage to open them again; I was still stuck in the dark, but it felt like I could now start to look around and faintly recognize the outlines of things around me.
It wasn't enough, though. I kept acting like nothing was wrong, feigning an outward semblance of normalcy, which was easy enough because of that distance I had established from anyone around me who might have noticed anything wrong. It seemed, during a period of deeply diminished rational thought, like a necessary form of self-preservation, though anyone with common sense intact would have realized that isolation could only exacerbate my helpless, drowning feeling. My friends at home had some sense of my struggle, but there's only so much encouragement that can be conveyed across an ocean. My boyfriend at the time knew as much as I could bring myself to share with him, and his comfort and support kept me afloat, but one person can never wholly bear someone else's weight. My pastoral supervisor (the department faculty member each student is assigned for academic and, when necessary, personal guidance) knew, and his genuine sympathy and unwavering belief in my ability to succeed regardless allowed a tiny part of me to hope that he might be right, but his faith was no match for my doubt. In stark contrast, my dissertation supervisor (with whom I had previously never interacted before she was chosen to advise my proposed research) knew me for little else than my depression and its symptoms: missed deadlines, lack of communication, and an absolute inability to produce the slightest scrap of meaningful scholarship, let alone a 15,000-word thesis.
By August, I knew I would need an extension. As the other students in my program commiserated about their hours in the library or celebrated their latest breakthrough in advance of our September 15 deadline, I kept to myself the days on end spent in my bed, unable to find solace in anything but the blankness of sleep and more sleep. I think I hoped, but didn't necessarily believe, that I might finally wake up and discover myself restored; I would be all better, and I could make up for lost time. I would snap out of it any day now, then everything could proceed as normal. That illusion shattered when my boyfriend abruptly broke up with me.
After two and a half years together, he said he didn't see a future with me; after multiple transatlantic flights, my decision to attend an English university, innumerable three-hour train journeys and joyful reunions/heart-wrenching goodbyes at the station platform, he said it was "too hard" to keep the relationship going. He had been unhappy "for a long time," he said. I know what that's like, I could have responded sarcastically, but I didn't want to fight; I wanted to make it better. I cried, he cried, I reasoned, I pleaded, I made promises – anything to save the best thing I had in my life, both then and ever. Through sobs, mine and his, he insisted it was "best for both of us," and then he abandoned me.
It's not his fault I left school immediately after that. My dissertation supervisor, I'm sure, had already written me off by the time I applied for a formal leave of absence from the university for one year. I wouldn't blame her if she was relieved to be rid of me. My GP wrote the necessary letter of medical support, as he must have done for so many other students before me. I don't know what he said, exactly, but I used his language in my own brief appeal for leave, citing my "loss of drive" and need to "recover," as if I had any idea what recovery would look like. I called my mother and told her all at once that I was coming home, that I was too depressed to manage, and that my relationship was over. My father asked if I was depressed because of the breakup, and even in all my vulnerability, I was offended. Of course I hadn't been shattered so thoroughly by just one boy; that boy just happened to be the last thing keeping me from giving up. I didn't tell anyone else on my course that I was jumping ship before the September deadline they were all diligently working towards, with the exception of one person I ran into in town – another English student whose work I admired, but who knew me little enough that it felt safe to say, "I'm not turning in my dissertation, actually; I'm going on a leave of absence for a while." I think we both wished each other good luck.
I can't remember now whether I ever explained to my friends in so many words why I reappeared in our hometown a year after most of our group had deserted it; we'd kept up with each other well enough, the core group of us, that they implicitly understood that I was coming home for a little while to "sort some things out." I don't remember much of those first few weeks, actually. I know that I had a panic attack while doing some last-minute packing, missed my flight, had to get an expensive last-minute hotel room in Manchester and endure an hour of customer service negotiations with my flight booking agent, and collapsed into bed as soon as I got home. I didn't unpack for weeks; in fact, there are still a few things still rattling around in my suitcases now, a year and a half later. Just a few weeks after I got home, I have no recollection of how I spent my 23rd birthday.
Looking back, it seems miraculous that I found a job so quickly that fall, albeit a part-time one. I was overdressed for my interview at a bakery on the Friday before Halloween, sitting across the table from my soon-to-be-manager wearing leggings and Minnie Mouse ears, but I got assigned regular shifts and started to rebuild my life around the routine of setting a wake-up alarm, getting dressed, arranging cookies in glass display jars, smiling at customers, and tying up boxes of cupcakes with pink string. When I started to feel more ambitious, I reapplied at a tutoring center five minutes from my house that had failed to call me back the previous summer, and I slowly started using my brain again to teach pre-college sixteen-year-olds the fundamentals of English grammar. I kept at my freelance writing assignments for the mental_floss website all the while, though I constantly missed deadlines and worried every week that they'd find someone better.
After eight months, I sent in a polite resignation email and left behind the bakery, the numbing dullness of standing still behind a counter watching the seconds tick by, and the indignity of mopping at customers' feet at the end of a long night as they dropped crumbs and laughed and refused to leave, long after closing time. The tutoring center began to need me more and more, assigning me students with learning disabilities as well as those aiming for the Ivy League, asking me if I could possibly tutor math and science as well as verbal, entrusting me with the younger children, requesting that I come in early and stay late and making me feel, in some small way, necessary. All the while, the official date of my re-enrollment at York loomed, but the thought of researching and writing a 15,000-word work of literary analysis continued to seem as impossible as it had the year before. After having started to feel better, I once again started to feel worse – just in time for the department to email me asking if I planned to return as expected. I didn't want to say no, but I couldn't bring myself to say yes.
At the end of the summer and, for some people, the start of a new school year, I saw a psychologist for the first time. She scheduled me in for weekly sessions and referred me to a psychiatrist, who prescribed a different medication than the one whose effectiveness had waned. Both of them were optimistic about my treatment, and I felt some confidence in applying to extend my leave by a set period of a few more months, sure that I was really on the upward swing this time and would be ready to tackle the dreaded dissertation – the obstacle between me and a Masters degree – by the start of 2016. My therapist spent weeks simultaneously reminding me that while my value as a person is not determined by my ability to submit a 60-page essay and the failure to do so shouldn't ruin my sense of self-worth, the psychological baggage associated with the dissertation was clouding a fact that likely seems obvious to anyone whose personal identity isn't in crisis: it's just a paper. It's just a stupid paper that is a requirement for me to graduate with a silly degree that doesn't make me a better person for getting it and, conversely, wouldn't make me a worse person if I never got it. I know that now.
Two weeks ago, I threw out my old dissertation topic, baggage and all, and came up with a new one. My supervisor never responded to my last email months ago and I wouldn't be surprised if she's even forgotten who I am, but I decided to forge ahead without her anyway. My deadline is in a week, and I've been feverishly reading and researching, telling myself I can cobble together those 15000 words minimum at least well enough to pass – not to score particularly highly, not to be praised, not to be singled out for a stunning work of academic achievement that marks me as a remarkable scholar and intellectual, but just to pass. If I do, the degree itself is secondary; what I really want is closure. I want to know that this time hasn't been a waste. I want proof that I'm in a better place now than I was two years ago, and maybe that will mean that the next two years will be even better. I don't know whether this will work out the way I want it to, but then again, even if it doesn't, I might still be okay.
Anyway, that's the real answer to, "So how are you?" that I haven't shared until now. I'm okay. I've been better, but I've been worse, so right now, I'm okay. Thank you for asking.
