Introduction

I wanted to start a blog about my life, because I humbly feel I have interesting stories to tell. For the past 5 years, I have suffered from severe depression with suicidal ideation, as well as a few other interesting mental quirks. I enjoy sharing my story with others in the hope that I might be encouraged, but also with the hope that I might encourage others, who live with these feelings in silence, so that they might know they are not alone. I thought about starting a blog series on facebook, but no one really reads facebook notes very often, and I feel like blogs are more classy. I have always enjoyed writing to an audience, because I love to write a story that will raise emotion in people and remind them what it is to be human.

Many of my close friends already know the basic facts of my story. I had a pretty decent childhood up until high school. I've always been made fun of for my nerd-like tendencies, which are now fortunately celebrated at Carolina. However, at the end of my 8th grade year, my two best friends moved away, and for whatever reason, I did not cope with it well. Entering into high school, I made no close friends and people made fun of me a lot. Of course, back then I also made fun of myself, because it was better to be laughed with than laughed at. I earned the nickname "the friendless wonder" and one of the low points in my life was when someone I'd never met called me that in the hallway at school. I daydreamed about killing myself early on in high school, and started writing dark, "emo" things around my Sophomore year. I was insanely lonely and sucked into a dark world where nothing but pain existed. It is impossibly to describe the pain of depression to someone who has not experienced it, but suffice to say it was torturous and enough to make me wish I was dead. Since middle school, I have not gone more than a month without relapsing into a bout of severe depression so painful as to make me fantasize about dying. It has gotten easier to manage in college though, where I have so many wonderful friends who love and accept me. I went to therapy my junior year of high school, which was a joke, and managed to slightly help my OCD tendencies, but not my depression. I started going back to therapy my Spring semester of Freshman year at Carolina through the school, but it was also not super helpful except for the fact it got me in touch with another therapist who I see regularly and like a lot. This summer, I also started taking antidepressants. For a long time, I did not want to take them because I wanted to feel better "on my own", but I finally realized that wasn't working and that I should try something else. Taking medication has been an interesting experience with weird side effects and I am still trying to straighten out the right meds for me, but I can definitely tell where the medication has helped me be able to think a little more rationally when I want to die. Depression for Dummies, which a friend recommended to me, is also an excellent book that has been helpful to me, which I highly recommend. Yesterday and today were good days. Last week was not as good a week. I hope to write about good and bad days in this blog, because both are important.

If you have any questions about my life, or depression and general, you can comment and I'll try to answer the best I can.