For the past year and a half, I've been recovering from depression. Recovery was always a goal for me, as it is for most struggling with mental health.
But what I didn't realise what would happen when I started to recover. In my head, it would go from cruel darkness to pure joy and happiness overnight. Of course, unrealistic, but your mind is compromised when riddled with depression.
Going through recovery, I realised I had lost my identity.
I was no longer the mentally ill girl, depression the focus of my life.
So who was I?
Who was I before depression ate away with me? And I realised with horror, that I didn't know. I had been diagnosed with depression about six or seven months before starting to feel like I was recovering, after suffering for a long time. I had been suicidal and my GAD and panic attacks had begun to spin out of control, hence my diagnosis.
But depression does not begin or end with diagnosis.
I tried to recall the start of my depression, but still to this day, I cannot pinpoint it, but I remember being tempted to self harm at only eight years old.
Eight. Such a little number. If I was suffering from depression at such a young age, how was I supposed to know who I was? I felt depression had been a huge part of my life. Of my personality. It gave me a form of stability, that I was the depressed girl.
Depression was what defined me.
And I didn't know what to do without it.
The dark can be addictive, especially when you don't know what to do without it.
I then realised my whole personality had been altered due to what inevitable caused my anxiety and depression (something I'm not comfortable talking about.. maybe one day), and that upset me immensely.
I had no clue who I was, who I was born to be. The person I was born to be was forced to dramatically change, and I had no clue who I was apart from being a walking mental illness.
Upset, I turned to my boyfriend, feeling totally lost.
"But I love you for who you are now", he had told me. "If you were a different person, I wouldn't love you, because you wouldn't be... you"
Then I realised. I did have a personality. I wasn't just depression. I wasn't just mental illness.
I was a living human that had a rough time, but I had feelings and opinions and thoughts and people who loved me just the way I am.
And for the first time during my recovery, I didn't feel as lost any more.
I was me. I was always me. I was not depression. I was not anxiety. I was not a mental illness.
I had never lost myself. Depression never won.
If you've read recent blog posts, you'll know I've recently finished my Leaving Cert (hence the erratic upload schedule). During it, I was surprising calm, and only cried over two exams. History failed me, unfortunately. But, I couldn't understand why I was so calm. Why wasn't Becky rearing her ugly head? When I thought about it, I realised something strange. All the exams I had done were a blur. I felt like I hadn't even done them. When I came out of an exam and was asked a question about the paper, I blanked. I just didn't remember. I was forgetting a lot of things in day to day life, and feeling numb. That's when I realised what I was doing, I wasn't being present. Feeling as if you're not present is a major symptom of anxiety, so I suppose it has become an unintentional coping method for me. I'd look in the mirror and think, Wow, I'm actually that person. That reflection is me! It's really hard to explain what this feeli
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