#I'm definitely not going off them to check because ssri withdrawals are brutal

[ehlnofay]

recovering from mental illness is very... odd. (and isn’t that a sentence I’m delighted to be able to say?)

I was first diagnosed with a depressive disorder when I was about ten or eleven, and I don’t know how long it had been lurking before that. I’ve been thinking recently, and I don’t think that it’s something that really affects me anymore, at least not to the extent that it once did - it crops up every now and again, but it isn’t frequent; it doesn’t twist up my whole life like it used to. it doesn’t consume me. and that’s kind of a terrifying thing to realise. I don’t know how to think that I might be okay without waiting for the other shoe to drop, because in the past it always, always has. and maybe it will - I’m not naïve enough to think that it’s for sure over and done with forever. but maybe it won’t. and I think it’s about time I came to terms with that possibility, too.

I’m not sorry to be rid of it, I’ll say that right up top. depression is a nightmare in a way that I don’t think I can really explain to anyone who’s never experienced it. for me it was so rarely that I even felt terrible; it wasn’t a constant onslaught of psychological torment - just this quiet, bone-deep conviction that this was as good as it was ever going to get, that there was nothing in the world that was better, that the only place to go was downhill, so why bother? I don’t miss that shit and I hope with everything in me that I never have to deal with it again.

no. it’s not the feeling that I miss. but I think, at least partly, that I miss... the identity, I guess? this has been a part of me since I was about eleven. my teenage years have been shaped by it. almost all of my life that I can remember was defined by it. I don’t really know how to live without it. I don’t quite know who I am without it. it’s like the circus elephant analogy. I’ve pulled the post out of the ground - but the world is so big, and I don’t even remember where it was I wanted so badly to escape to. where do I go now? in some ways the choice is scarier than being chained down.

I still don’t know. but I’m really, really glad I lived long enough to try and find out.