I personally struggle with depression. Chronic depression. It runs in my family. My brother has it, my mom has it. It’s hereditary. My mom refuses to let us get medicated.
When my brother started taking medication, he gained a lot of weight and my mom is a little fat phobic, so she’s terrified of any of us gaining weight or anything, so she’s like, “No. No one can be medicated, just get a lot of therapy” and that was always kind of hard because you can only get therapy once a week and there are times when you need it every day.
I’ve known [my therapist] for a really long time, which is a good thing. I actually started seeing him for my own reasons in middle school when I was struggling with being gay.
One day I was sitting in my room and I just realized I’m not straight. This whole identity I’ve built for myself just came crashing down and I came crashing down with it. That was a big cause of what sent me initially into depression and then I never really got out. I still struggle with it. I’m not out and there’s a reason for that.
I remember in seventh grade just getting home and I had a crush on a friend. And I had had crushes on girls before that, but I was like, “it’s just hormones.” But then when I realized, I can’t just pass this off as hormones, it was like I hated myself so much. Before I told anyone, I had to deal with it all alone. I knew, just by walking down the hall that [being gay] was stigmatized. People were going to treat me differently. I didn’t want to be treated differently. I wanted to be treated like the same person. That’s why I’m not out. I don’t want to be thought of as “a gay” I want to be thought of as this person you’ve known since kindergarten and still the same person.
You constantly have this facade up like people can’t know. Part of you wants people to know, so you can stop hiding this secret all the time, but part of you is so terrified about people knowing because people will treat you differently and you don’t know how. You go through every hypothetical and think of the worst ones possible. You’re always going to be recovering, you’re never going to be recovered. I’m just trying to be a little better than I was the day before. But then when you get bad again, you feel like you’ve disappointed everyone. People don’t realize it’s something you can’t control.
I got really, really bad last year and was contemplating suicide. You’re just stuck in this limbo. It makes you feel so guilty for feeling [suicidal]. I was like, “I want to die, but I can’t because people would be sad and I don’t want to make them sad. I know there are people that care about me, but I wish there weren’t because that would make it much easier.” You’re stuck in this limbo where you hate yourself and you don’t like yourself. You wanted to just go away, but you’re stuck living in this world that you just hate. I kept trying to get better. I went to therapy, but I was too scared to tell them how bad I was because I had gotten so much better. I tried to like vent, I went back to self harming a little bit, but it didn’t really help. One day I was like, let’s go buy some pills. But I couldn’t find any pills.
