Depression

My fears of dependence were so potent that I decided to quit meds for good. Though I didn’t just throw away mental healthcare, mind you, since I had been, and planned on continuing to go, to weekly therapy sessions. I wanted to find other ways to manage my mental illness without popping pills on the daily.

When I’m in the company of family, my strongly held beliefs about positive body image, my carefully honed confidence that I am more than numbers on a scale, my uncompromising rebellion against the patriarchy and its arbitrary rules for women’s sexuality, crumbles into a fine dust that blows away with one heavy sigh.

...[B]eing among the dead rightsizes my problems, makes me feel small like staring at the ocean. After all, we are all being carried along toward the same inevitable fate as the men and women whose headstones I pass on my daily strolls. The best we can hope for is that someday someone will stop to calculate our ages and wonder about our lives after we’re gone.

[CN: suicidal thoughts, self-harm] Why is it OK to minimize the symptoms of a serious, debilitating, chronic condition with no cure just because it’s mental, not physical?

[CN: suicidal thoughts, self-harm] Why is it OK to minimize the symptoms of a serious, debilitating, chronic condition with no cure just because it’s mental, not physical?

[CN: vomit] Having been an unfeeling, sluggish husk of a person with the nap-taking skills of an elderly sloth for the past five months or so, I have reemerged too tender for this world.

[CN: vomit] Having been an unfeeling, sluggish husk of a person with the nap-taking skills of an elderly sloth for the past five months or so, I have reemerged too tender for this world.

These are precious years; years that pass too quickly as your little ones speed towards adulthood and the ever increasing awareness that their parents are fallible. What I never wanted, nor expected, was for these years to be punctuated by my second spell of severe depression.