rayofmemory's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ::neglected:: sorrie diaryland for not posting for a couple of days..i know you all missed me terribly... so...i decided to wait on posted "my heart out" (the teencentral.net letter...for those who have no idea in what the fuck i am talking about...see the last entry)...but i will post it soon :) grrr, ya know what..screw it...its going up: a couple of days ago something inside me snapped and i cried forever...and i remember seeing a commercial for teencentral.net(months before) and decided to write them and ask for advice...and i thought i would share it with you(theres so much more i wanted to say....but my mind was reeling and my hands couldn't keep up): I�m sixteen years old and I've had severe depression for about two years. I could never quite pin point when it started or what caused it. I�ve been seeing the school counselor regularly since ninth grade (now in tenth). There is a bottle of St. John�s Wort sitting on my dresser unopened. I never wanted to take medication. I remember sitting, talking to my mom and her saying something about �doctors are so quick to hand out medication. Why would anyone want to take Prozac or anything like that? Don�t they realize that that stuff messes with the chemicals in your brain?� From that moment on I never wanted to take medication. I'm almost afraid of it. I don�t want to change...but I do. A couple of months ago I finally confessed to my mother my problem. (She knew before, but didn�t know quite how serious it was.) My school counselor convinced me to. I always thought that I could get rid of my depression alone, without any help. The counselor knew my fear of anti-depressants and recommended St. John�s Wort. My mother said I could try it...but I haven�t been able to force myself to swallow one. Even something all natural like the Wort, still seems to scare me. When people find out that I have severe depression they ask �are you doing anything about it�. And when I say no they looked surprised. But that's the problem with depression. It sucks any desire to do anything right out of you. I had goals and I had dreams...and I still have them but I believe I will never reach them. Maybe that's what started the depression. Once I learned that I was human too and would have to do and go through the same things other people do. I don�t know. I'm not suicidal...although I cannot say I never think about it. And that's the conclusion I came up with today. I'm killing inside because I cannot be killed. I can�t bring myself to do it. I can�t leave my friends and family. That's a good thing but that's what's killing me. I don�t want to die. I never have wanted to. I just want to go away for a while. Leave and not have to do anything. But I know that suicide is permanent and I don�t want to do that. I think that's why I'm depressed anyway. I'm not for sure. Recently anything that I've come up with, any ideas about why I have depression and what caused it, my mother does not know about. I haven�t told her yet. (My mom and I have a good relationship.) I went to my counselor yesterday and talked to her about the �well hole� situation. As an example of depression I say it�s a well hole. I think I'm all the way out and I fall right back down. Maybe I grab a hold of a brick and hang on...but I stay there. Or maybe I fall all the way down and am suffocated in the water...I drown. I've never made it all the way out. I had a wonderful childhood, good friends. Incidents do happen and some things to the extreme, but I had my depression before that. So, maybe I don�t know what caused it. Anyway, my counselor, yesterday, told me to keep a little calendar and write down how my day went. Like when I starting getting depressed, what triggered it...to see if there are any patterns. And I've decided to try that. But she said �maybe it is school. And maybe that is what triggers it. Something that happens at school and you just can�t handle it. Or maybe even really low self-esteem. If that is it, then we�ll deal with it and come up with possible solutions.� But I already know that it�s bigger than that. This illness, this depression is bigger than anything, bigger than me. Maybe things at school add to it, but it isn�t it. I have a feeling that I'll never get rid of it. For a while I thought I could live with it, get through my entire life with it. Now I realize it�s kind of what's stopping me from having a life. I don�t go anywhere I don�t do anything. I'm not saying that if I was better I would to that, but I don�t care if I succeed or not. I do if it�s a report card. I care whether or not I'll be in trouble with bad grades. But like I said it takes the desire to do anything right out of me. At first I thought �well maybe if I talk to people, such as a counselor, about my problems then I'll feel better and it will just go away.� So I talked to my mom even more than I did before and talked to a counselor but I didn�t feel any better, just more paranoid. I'm supposed to take drivers training this summer. I don�t want to do it. I'm scared out of my mind. I don�t want to get a job. It's not just laziness, it's no desire. I want to be able to get up in the morning without having to convince myself that it's ok to go to school. I want to be able to get a healthy amount of sleep at night. I don�t want to be paranoid. I don�t want to have social anxiety disorder. I don�t want to be overwhelmed and stressed out all the time. I don�t want to have extremely low self-esteem. But if I get rid of depression, even though I don�t think its possible, I'm afraid I'll miss it. I can�t live without the isolation feeling. I can�t function without it. A year ago a girl named Ashley was talking to my friend Kimi and told her �she's really pretty� while she was looking at me. I looked behind me almost joking as if she was talking about someone else. I smiled and was flattered. But I didn�t feel anything. No warm fuzzy feeling anymore, just emptiness. That feeling of aloneness. Happiness was gone. It was before, but I knew it even more then. And I thought I'd never see it again. So I guess what I want is to keep the severe depression but learn how to function with it. (The one good thing that came from the depression was my writing. I can write poems like crazy. And I love them and so do other people. They're not happy poems. They came from within me. And it�s my passion. And I'm almost afraid that if I become happy my poems will be scum. They won�t be as great as they were before. Maybe they�ll be happy and start rhyming and I like them the way they are. That they can come for something so horrible that I can�t control. But I guess I don�t think it's all that horrible since I want to keep it. I guess I truly am a walking contradiction. I believe now that I can take the St. John�s Wort because I believe that I should but I guess I was looking for another outlet. (p.s...this was not in the letter...but i thought you should know that i started taking the Wort today :)) their response was:It is often more difficult to deal with change than to continue to live in an uncomfortable situation. Only when the situation becomes intolerable will you seek to change it. In terms of inspiration, high emotion can be important. However it does not have to be just sadness. 4:45 p.m. - 2001-12-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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