Depression: A Thousand Scars You Cannot See

I tried to kill myself.  I swallowed a whole bottle of No-Doz and went about my business like nothing had happened.  I didn't plan it.  I didn't write any suicide notes.  I didn't give away any personal belongings.  I say the books have it all wrong.  Everyone was shocked, and really, so was I.  The only thing that stands out as a warning sign is that I had carved my boyfriends name into the inside of my ankle about a week prior to this.  I don't remember what grade I was in, but I think I was 13.  And thirteen seems to be where it all started.


I really don't remember being sad and depressed before this happened, but people don't go around swallowing bottles of pills for the fun of it. (at least not those kinds of pills for those kinds of reasons)  It was a horrible experience that has left its scars upon me.    I recovered and it didn't do any permanent damage.  The pills themselves weren't going to kill me, but they were trying there damnedest to give me a heart-attack.  If you know anything about resting heart rates you will no that a resting heart rate of 196 is not good.  This little trip to the hospital landed me a prime spot at a psychologists office.  My Mom had little faith in her since she wanted to medicate me after talking with me for 30 minutes.  I think we went on to find another because my Mom wanted someone someone who would spend more time getting to know me and the situation before prescribing Prozac to magically take away my troubles.  I don't know if this was the right decision, but it also wasn't mine to make.

I thought about killing myself once again and this time I was going to do some damage.  They stupid doctor at the ER told me how fortunate I was that I didn't take x, y or z because of what they would have done to me, so now I essentially knew how to do it right the next time.  I don't know what the precursor was to me making this decision, but I dumped out my giant bottle of Advil and started to count them out to make sure I had enough.  I took four of them and my Mother barged into my room.  I tried to cover up the pile of pills, but she saw them and dragged my butt to the ER.  I tried to tell her I had only taken 4 because I had a headache and was just counting the pills.  Both of these statements were true and I vehemently argued that I was not going to try and commit suicide, but that was not so true.  I found myself in the same ER, facing the same treatments.  They made me vomit and only saw three pills in the pan and I told them that is because I only took 4.  They didn't believe me and figured the rest of the pills had already been absorbed into my system and so I was to drink liquid charcoal.  I didn't.  I dumped it in the garbage and then I used the restroom and dumped more down the toilet.  They really weren't keeping a good eye on me at all.  After this there was a new therapist and eventually there was also a pretty new prescription as an added accessory.

As I said my previous blog I have been on a lot of different anti-depressants, but my first was Zoloft.  When I started taking it I got a little shaky and if you looked closely you would see that my hands shook.  It would only last a little while and get better as the day progressed.  The other thing it did was made me poop, alot.  I knew I would have to have access to a bathroom if I was going to eat.  I could almost set my watch by it.  I would eat lunch and about 15 minutes later my lunch was in the toilet.  People thought I was either anorexic or severely depressed and at the time I was neither.  I didn't really understand what all the fussing was about until I saw a picture of myself that my Dad had taken on some holiday.  I took one look at myself in that photo and wondered why I hadn't been committed somewhere.  I looked sick and unhealthy.  Maybe some girls would have been happy to look that thin, but I wasn't.  I went back to my psychiatrist and we decided to try Paxil.  I hated Paxil.  It made me feel like I was drugged.  I think it made me feel exactly how people fear a antidepressant will make them feel....clouded and slow.  It wasn't too long after that I convinced her to put me back on Zoloft and that I was just going to have to force myself to eat more or just look like death warmed over.

I stayed in therapy and on Zoloft throughout High School and the first part of college, but it got to be too difficult for me to keep up appointment that required a 5-hour drive each way.  So what did I do?  I quit cold turkey.  **DO NOT ever do this as the professionals are not lying when they tell you that you need to ween off of it because you will go through withdrawal and it is NOT fun**  After recovering from that I did pretty darn well for quite some time.  I still had plenty of issues, but I wasn't depressed, at least not until my third year in the frozen tundra they like to call North Dakota.  This is one of the first times I was able to recognize the depression trying to weave its way back into my life.  All those 'signs' starting showing up slowly and I also had some new ones appear.  I guess my old friend wanted to bring some new friends along to the party.  I started to hear a amplified sounds.  The best way I can describe it is that the softest sounds, the ones you wouldn't normally notice, sounded so loud and sounded like they were yelling at me.  I didn't hear any voices telling me what to do, it wasn't like that, but the sound of my feet walking along the carpet would be almost unbearable.  To this day I don't know what that was or why it occurred, but thankfully it has happened very rarely.  I went through a long period of trying to stave it off, this depression, but then I found myself standing in a snowbank.  My boyfriend and I were coming home and I just stopped in the snowbank and stayed there for an hour or so.  I think I needed to feel something, even if it happened to be that of my toes freezing.  I needed something to shock my system into a reboot, something to grab a hold of me and shake away this heavy, numbing spell I was under.  I stood there and didn't move and it didn't work.  I didn't feel the cold and I didn't feel better and I knew it was time for me to move home and make some changes.

I moved home and made some very poor decisions, behaved selfishly, hurt a few people and did some things I wholly regret, all the while trying to evade the beast.  It found me though, that silent, slow-moving predator and it finally grabbed ahold of me, put my head between its hands, slowly unlocked its claws and let them sink into my skull and when it knew it had a firm hold it drug me through the darkness.  When I say this I am not doing so with the intent of being creative with my words, I do it because when I close my eyes and think back to how it felt to finally sink in the depression, that is how I see it.  I can remember walking around holding my head in my heads and begging for it to let go.  I told myself over and over again that things were okay, that my life was good and that there was no reason for me to feel this way.  It was the depression and as soon as I could make it let go I would see that life was indeed worth living again.  I knew this time I needed help and I called my old therapists office to make an appointment.  I eventually came out okay and was able to enjoy life, but I knew deep down inside that it wasn't going to stay away.

There were more 'epidsodes' and a new therapist to match each one.  It was hard at times to draw the line between what was just plain normality and what I needed to be concerned about.  I mean, everyone has bad days and everyone gets depressed, so sometimes it was hard to know if it were just a shitty day or if it was the beginning of something worse.  The teenage years were even harder because of all the hormones and changes and the hell they call High School (you couldn't pay me enough to go back there).   I did stay on  medication and managed okay for quite some time and then I got pregnant.  I got pregnant, carried my beautiful baby girl for 8 months and then finally got to meet her, but I got to meet someone else as well.  Unbeknownst to me, depression had a relative by the name of post-partum depression and it was a whole new beast that left an entire new set of scars on my soul.