Personal Narrative: My Life As A Victim Of Depression

“Here is the tragedy: when you are the victim of depression, not only do you feel utterly helpless and abandoned by the world, you also know that very few people can understand, or even begin to believe, that life can be this painful. There is nothing I can think of that is quite as isolating as this” (Andreae). I began to struggle with depression when I was in my second year of middle school. People always assume a major life event is what caused it, but nothing had changed: my dad moved out of state when I was in the fourth grade, I was friends with the same people I had been friends with the previous year, and I had never been very close with my step-father. But none of this was new to me, so what had caused this change in my mentality? I genuinely

I would talk in class but was not able to allow myself to create new friendships. Eventually I began making friends, but they did not bring me the same feelings of joy the others had, so I never allowed myself to be any closer to anyone. I would often spend the lunch period hiding in a bathroom stall crying, not because people had been mean to me or I had problems at home, I just felt so deeply unhappy with myself that I did not know how to deal with it. The sadness was then accompanied by numbness, and I finally thought of a way to deal with it. I started inflicting physical pain upon myself as a way to distract from the emotional turmoil I had been in for so long-- and it worked. Bringing pain upon myself cause me to not focus so much on what had been going on inside my head for so long, but unfortunately, this had not gone unnoticed. I wore long sleeves year-round so no one would know what I had been doing, but when it is 95 degrees outside and you wear long sleeves, people begin to notice. My mother finally saw the damage I had done and her response was “why did you do