Somehow, I’m Still Here
Content Warning: This post includes mention of severe depression and anxiety, drugs, and toxic relationships. But also: hope.
If you know me, you know my story. If you don’t, it’s a long one — one that started about ten years ago when I was finally diagnosed with depression and anxiety.
It’s been, in an effort to not mince words, a fucking slog.
It’s not a fun story, an easy read you take with you to the beach. It’s the kind of story that, if you read it, you’d be yelling at the pages, willing the protagonist to do something, anything, other than whatever she’s actually doing. There has to be anything else besides sleeping 18 hours a day, crying about various lost loves and miscellaneous traumas, anything else beyond dangling closer and closer to the eternal void. But there wasn’t, not for her.
The heroine was not lovable, or someone seeming capable of success. She blamed a lot of her issues on the relationships that traumatized her, and not enough on her own part in them. She ruined friendships, fumbled opportunities, made near-strangers uncomfortable, lost jobs, and isolated herself so thoroughly that it became hard to root for her at all.
She tried the best she could, kind of. She took meds, trying and retrying new cocktails of SSRIs; she cried to a lot of therapists, private practices and…
