Moments

Because I needed a hug today

It’s one of those moments in life where it’s far too difficult to face yourself, yet you know you must if you’re ever to survive. You’ve let yourself down in some monumental way, or perhaps it’s the same mistake repeatedly. The feeling to run and hide can be overwhelming, and for me it was. This is my story of depression. I’ve never written or even really spoken of it my entire life because I thought I could beat it on my own. Here’s proof that I haven’t.

I’ve had depression, severe depressions since I was a kid. Coming clean and talking about anything that makes me less than perfect is something I’ve chosen not to do until now. What these symptoms, along with my own bad decisions, have led me to commit shames me. Why would I want people to see that? Put into perspective though, these things are nothing outrageously terrible. For me, however, my mistakes could cost me my future.

My education is quite literally all I have that is my own. My future is what I hold on to. That promise of better. I boil up inside when people say it will get better. I’ve actually started to scream at them, I scream that I’ve been waiting 15+ years for things to be better. I’m sick of hearing it, and I’m sick of hoping; and yet here I am. Hoping. My education is the only way out, and it seems I’ve failed.

I need to put this out there, and it is not for bragging purposes but purely to show that I am perfectly capable of passing. I use to be a straight-A student, and that comes with minimal effort. Within this year my attendance waned, and my workload piled up, something that has NEVER happened to me. I freaked, just straight-up broke the fuck down. I can’t pinpoint the reason of this break-down, but it completely and utterly consumed me. All I saw was darkness. I got so behind in my school work that it became physically impossible for me to catch up. So I didn’t. Three classes…failed. Three very important classes might I add. Failed.

I made the decision that I needed outside help because my dreams are massive and not for the weak of will, and I refuse to go down without a fight. Even if the enemy is me. I have wild dreams of being a top professor at Oxford with documentaries and books are written by me soaring the internet and stores. I want to travel the world as an activist and fix the things I read about in the papers. I want to do all of these things and more, and sometimes it feels as if I’ll burst. I know I cannot do all of these things, but I’ll work towards them none the less. I can still teach, and I can still protest what matters to me. But it will never be enough.

My outside help was a therapist and the thing I dreaded most, medication. It dulls me. It dulls my writing and it dulls my senses, but it’s easier to just be. So the question ends up being, do I choose to lose what really makes me, the fire and the passion, but gain a general balance, the ability to function? Do I want the white fence, SUV and kids? Or do I choose the all-consuming chaos that will destroy me in the end so that I can have that fierce passion? I can choose to feel things, or I can choose not to.

I will always choose fire.

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