In middle school, I stopped going to school. I was so depressed that I couldn’t get up in the morning and I couldn’t do any of it so I stopped going to school. I got a special learning environment, a person came to my house to work through whatever teachers at school would normally give. Every day it would be really hard, I would have constant meltdowns, screaming really bad things, writing mean things on the wall. I would think about suicide, I would think about running away. The worst of it was probably a year long. I switched several schools during that time period just to try and find somewhere that would help me. I ended up here at Clayton and this is my fourth year here, which is the longest since grade school.
I am really, very sensitive, especially to seasonal changes. So in winter I get depressed a lot more easily. But in stretches of time when it gets more noticeable, it’s hard for me to get up in the morning, it’s hard for me to go to school and I don’t feel like doing anything. I feel awful that I’m not doing something, but I don’t want to do anything. It’s really weird to be in society where people are so normal, but you have this thing inside you that you can’t control. You don’t know what’s going on and I mean it gets really hard sometimes.
Fortunately I am past the worst of what I have and when I have trouble I often think back to a few years ago when I had an absolutely horrible time with depression, that left me in such an awful, awful state that I am still recovering from that now. I think of that and that always helps me know that I can get through this and that there is a better way and that I will be able to. Being around other people really helps me just to kind of not really think about things.
Fortunately it’s been pretty stable lately. In previous years, it affected everything I do from when I go outside, where I want to sit at lunch, how much homework I feel like I need to get done. Just being in public, even a classroom, it used to be really hard for me to open up.
It could be a whole lot worse, life could be a whole lot worse.
