Hands down, ignoring my depression for so many years. Cost me countless friends and relationships.
The shame people at least used to put in getting any kind of help for mental health made me try to overcome it all on my own, and for most of my life I’ve probably made things worse for a lot of people and don’t fault them one bit for not wanting to be around me.
Getting help, for me at least, was very easy, cheap, and straightforward, and I almost immediately did a 180 in most every aspect of my life. I hardly recognize how old me used to live now, but I also have the guilt of all I did while I was untreated.
For a few years after college I swear I was in some sort of depression. I barely remember anything from those years and my friend from then tells me about stuff I did that I have zero recollection of.
You can’t entirely blame someone who was unwell for not handling things as best as they could. You did what you needed to, you get the help you needed, and now you can do better. That alone is more than so many people can do, just because depression is a sneaky, underhanded, evil monster!
I hope that you can find a line to walk between taking responsibility for your actions, and giving yourself grace for what you were going through.
The worst part of mental issues is the part of your body that needs to be fixed is the part that isn’t working right and is the part that is supposed to make decisions.
I accept what is done, and I use those things as learning experiences now. I wish I could forget some of it, but now that I can understand what I’ve done in the past, it makes the lessons really stick now.
I don’t know if I’d consider myself “happy” at the current period of time I’m in, because meds or therapy aren’t cures, they just let you process stuff in a more productive way. I’m fighting with my job about a bunch of issues I see as them not looking out for my safety, and there’s always family drama and I don’t have much in common with my own or my girlfriend’s family. I’m just able to process all that without flying off the handle or totally walling myself off from everyone and all that fun unhealthy stuff. I’m at least able to appreciate the good things that do still happen though, which I couldn’t before.
Talking about it and trying to destigmatize it is part of the responsibility I feel, because while I can’t undo any of what I did, I can at least try to help other people to help themselves so they can avoid walking down the same path as I did for so long. It helps them, and all the people that those people run into in life.
I always tell folks that not being miserable, when you’ve had depression for so long, is such a step up that “happy” didn’t even matter to me for years.
You seem like you’re being so smart! I’m really impressed!
For me, depression felt like things just stuck to me. Everything negative, from minor and petty things to real major life events. Every time something new would happen, it would get stuck to that pile of things and pull on all that negativity, waking it up again. Like if you’d forget you said you’d help me with something, it would bother me because you forgot, but it would also trigger all the other negative things I could think of about my history with you and me, and often with other unrelated people, making me feel like nobody cared about me, or that I was just a joke of afterthought to everyone in my life, even though it was nothing more than something just slipping your mind. So instead of just sayin, oh no problem, you were probably just busy and got disctracted, i’m glad you’re here now, it’d trigger vivid memories of like 100 bad things that happened to me all at once. It’s just impossible to function like that.
Almost immediately after I got on medicine that costs me less than Tylenol, all that stickiness was gone. Being able to separate my feelings and deal with them one at a time as they came in instead of trying to cope with a life’s worth of issues all at once was so life changing! It finally gave me time to resolve my feelings about those old events and to move on from them instead of dragging them with me everywhere I went.
When I feel really bad now, I feel that weight start to build and it tells me that I need to look inward more seriously again. I feel myself reach the limits of the medicine. I tried to up the dosage (with doctor’s permission!), but that made me too tired. I just have to pay attention and assert myself where I can with people causing me issues, and I need to make sure I’m having good times with people and activities I do like. It’s like watching your hunger now. You don’t want to let yourself starve, and you don’t want to get so hungry you pig out on a bunch of junk. I just need to be smart about my emotions. It’s way easier still than if I would not be on my medicine. It’s so scary to think that I could still be that old way, and if I ever forget to take my medicine I do feel it creeping in. There are a few downsides to meds for me, but I feel they are very minor compared to the depression.
Hands down, ignoring my depression for so many years. Cost me countless friends and relationships.
The shame people at least used to put in getting any kind of help for mental health made me try to overcome it all on my own, and for most of my life I’ve probably made things worse for a lot of people and don’t fault them one bit for not wanting to be around me.
Getting help, for me at least, was very easy, cheap, and straightforward, and I almost immediately did a 180 in most every aspect of my life. I hardly recognize how old me used to live now, but I also have the guilt of all I did while I was untreated.
For a few years after college I swear I was in some sort of depression. I barely remember anything from those years and my friend from then tells me about stuff I did that I have zero recollection of.
I remember a lot, but my memories often seem to account for things happening much differently. The mind does some amazing things to try to cope!
You can’t entirely blame someone who was unwell for not handling things as best as they could. You did what you needed to, you get the help you needed, and now you can do better. That alone is more than so many people can do, just because depression is a sneaky, underhanded, evil monster!
I hope that you can find a line to walk between taking responsibility for your actions, and giving yourself grace for what you were going through.
The worst part of mental issues is the part of your body that needs to be fixed is the part that isn’t working right and is the part that is supposed to make decisions.
I accept what is done, and I use those things as learning experiences now. I wish I could forget some of it, but now that I can understand what I’ve done in the past, it makes the lessons really stick now.
I don’t know if I’d consider myself “happy” at the current period of time I’m in, because meds or therapy aren’t cures, they just let you process stuff in a more productive way. I’m fighting with my job about a bunch of issues I see as them not looking out for my safety, and there’s always family drama and I don’t have much in common with my own or my girlfriend’s family. I’m just able to process all that without flying off the handle or totally walling myself off from everyone and all that fun unhealthy stuff. I’m at least able to appreciate the good things that do still happen though, which I couldn’t before.
Talking about it and trying to destigmatize it is part of the responsibility I feel, because while I can’t undo any of what I did, I can at least try to help other people to help themselves so they can avoid walking down the same path as I did for so long. It helps them, and all the people that those people run into in life.
I always tell folks that not being miserable, when you’ve had depression for so long, is such a step up that “happy” didn’t even matter to me for years.
You seem like you’re being so smart! I’m really impressed!
For me, depression felt like things just stuck to me. Everything negative, from minor and petty things to real major life events. Every time something new would happen, it would get stuck to that pile of things and pull on all that negativity, waking it up again. Like if you’d forget you said you’d help me with something, it would bother me because you forgot, but it would also trigger all the other negative things I could think of about my history with you and me, and often with other unrelated people, making me feel like nobody cared about me, or that I was just a joke of afterthought to everyone in my life, even though it was nothing more than something just slipping your mind. So instead of just sayin, oh no problem, you were probably just busy and got disctracted, i’m glad you’re here now, it’d trigger vivid memories of like 100 bad things that happened to me all at once. It’s just impossible to function like that.
Almost immediately after I got on medicine that costs me less than Tylenol, all that stickiness was gone. Being able to separate my feelings and deal with them one at a time as they came in instead of trying to cope with a life’s worth of issues all at once was so life changing! It finally gave me time to resolve my feelings about those old events and to move on from them instead of dragging them with me everywhere I went.
When I feel really bad now, I feel that weight start to build and it tells me that I need to look inward more seriously again. I feel myself reach the limits of the medicine. I tried to up the dosage (with doctor’s permission!), but that made me too tired. I just have to pay attention and assert myself where I can with people causing me issues, and I need to make sure I’m having good times with people and activities I do like. It’s like watching your hunger now. You don’t want to let yourself starve, and you don’t want to get so hungry you pig out on a bunch of junk. I just need to be smart about my emotions. It’s way easier still than if I would not be on my medicine. It’s so scary to think that I could still be that old way, and if I ever forget to take my medicine I do feel it creeping in. There are a few downsides to meds for me, but I feel they are very minor compared to the depression.