I have been debating whether to start a blog up again, but I've really just done this for myself to get my thoughts down and express myself. If it helps anybody along the way, well then that's just swell! A major part of subjects I will cover in this blog is my own personal experiences in regards to mental health. To be fair, there will never be a set topic, I will just go with the flow. However, due to mental health being an important topic for me I feel I must stress what this blog is not.
This blog will not glorify self-harming as I have seen on many Tumblr accounts before and neither is it a place for me to try and get pity. Believe me, I have enough self-pity to last me a lifetime! It is also not a place to get expert advice... I'm merely sharing my experiences/thoughts/feelings as I think not only will it help me to write it down, but someone might read it and realise they are not alone in their struggle. Now that is out of the way, I suppose I better share some of my story...
I have really battled with depression since the age of around 14 years old (although I didn't know at the time) and I was finally diagnosed in January 2013 at the age of 19 as having moderate to severe depression and anxiety. Being told I had depression was really hard for me to deal with, I didn't feel normal, I felt like a freak. I found that mental health was never really discussed, it seemed like a taboo subject and god forbid if you mentioned anything about suicide.
But I think maybe I should go back to the start when I first started to feel unhappy. There was a big event in my life that affected myself and my family in completely different ways. My eldest brother, Carl passed away in 2006, aged 19 after battling cancer. I was 13 at the time and thinking back now I don't think I understood the seriousness of what was happening. Undoubtedly, losing my brother was one of the hardest things I have ever had to deal with, but it was also just as hard to cope with the change in the family dynamics in the house. Now, I don't want to go into anymore detail with regards to the above as I feel some things need to be kept personal and in respect to my family too. The important thing is, that this is probably where my "issues" were first triggered.
In school, I found it hard to express my real emotions and always found I would just play the joker instead in front of friends. I was so confused in my head as to what I was actually feeling and it was very frustrating. It got to the point where I would cut my arms, which on the most part would have been for attention - a "cry for help" if you will. Looking back at it now, I saw it as my way of saying I was unhappy without actually having to have that conversation with my parents, school teachers or friends. It was never enough to cause any major damage and I was not suicidal.
I did start seeing the school counselor, but I found it difficult to talk to her and hated the long gaps of silence she would leave to see if I would say anything. It was much easier for me to make a joke or change the subject and smile like everything was fine. This was pretty much all I remember from high school with regards to feeling depressed.
I am aware of how long this post will end up being, so on my next post I will talk about the next chapter so to speak (I am loving the clichés at the moment) and what happened once I had left school.
Bye for now,
Lucy x
