My Journey with Mental Illness...

I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and anxiety at eighteen years old, six years after its onset. At twenty, I was diagnosed with ADHD. At twenty-two, I was diagnosed with mixed bipolar disorder. Unfortunately, all these were and are hereditary illnesses. And doubly unfortunate is that I’ve cycled through a various mixed-nut bag of schizophrenia, OCD, and borderline personality disorder.

On the bright side, narcissism (one of my father’s many mental illness contributions) isn’t hereditary, so I don’t have to worry about that one.

From the hellish list I have so kindly given you, you might think, “Jesus, what happened to this girl?”

I’ll be honest, it could have been much worse.

At nine, my father began his decade long string of blowing through jobs every four to six months, gallivanting across the country in search of the AFL team that would catapult him into the NFL. He pushed us into massive debt, which had neared $100,000 when my mother divorced him when I was sixteen. (She took on all the debt because he refused to take any responsibility for it, and she declared bankruptcy.) This all to say that he wasn’t around much during my teenage years.

My mother, however, was, and as much as I love her now, she took a lot of her anger at my father out on my little sister and me, but since I was the oldest, I did catch the brunt of it. Right before she divorced my father, he returned, and she decided that she was going to be home as little as possible and left my little sister and me alone with our father who she knew abused us. He would threaten to beat us (thankfully he was too lazy to follow through), make snide comments about anything we were doing, and yell if we were disturbing his TV watching, which consisted almost entirely of football games.

For most of my formative years, my mother was always stressed and pissed off, and my father wasn’t around, and I felt like a burden, and I took it out on my little sister. I wish now that I had seen I was doing the same thing my parents did to me to my little sister, but I didn’t. Thankfully though, my relationship with her is mostly repaired now.

It’s funny to look back on my childhood and condense it into a few paragraphs. It hardly captures the anguish and the constant flow of suicidal thoughts and the sad little attempt to unalive myself that was barely an attempt.

Part of me is still angry with my mother for dismissing my obvious depression as “mild” and “something everyone deals with as a teenager.” When I finally told her about my suicidal thoughts at seventeen, she was shocked, and I know why. My grades never slipped past a B, and I never cut or burned myself. I practiced different kinds of self-harm like scratching my skin, performing insertion masturbation without any kind of lube, and refusing to take painkillers for migraines. The ways I punished myself were subtle, and I can see how they slipped underneath my mother’s already distracted radar.

Now that we’ve powered through the hard shit, let us take a tour through my myriad of therapists from the past four years.

Therapist #1: an older lady who specialized in sex offender rehabilitation. My mother had no idea that was the therapist’s specialty, and when we walked into her office and noticed some of her degrees, I gave my mother a side-eye. My mother pinched her temples and whispered an apology, and I had to laugh. I had just come out to her as bisexual a month or so ago, and I had thought for a second she was sending me to conversion therapy. Thankfully, this was not the case, and it’s now a funny story we tell every once in a while. Overall, the therapist was fine, but I wasn’t making much progress with her even coupled with antidepressants. Eventually, I went to find a new one.

Therapist #2: a lady in her mid-thirties who was a counselor at my university. She described herself as having a “tough love” strategy when it came to therapy. I should have run right then because I’d had enough “tough love” in my childhood. My last session with this therapist went terribly. It was one of the last major fights I had ever had with my mother, and my therapist told me that my situation “could be worse” and that she “didn’t see why I was coming here.” So I shut down. It took me several months to even get up the nerve to look for another therapist again.

Therapist #3: another woman in her mid-thirties, this one pregnant. She was sweet, funny, and kind. However, she had this habit of saying that I collected mental illnesses like trophies, and when I tried to explain that I do tend to like diagnoses because my suffering was minimized for so long, she dismissed me. I was sick of being dismissed, so when she went on maternity leave earlier than expected, I stuck with the new therapist they scheduled me with.

Therapist #4 (current): young woman, early thirties. She recently also had a child, and she’s the sweetest, smartest woman I have ever met. I adore her, and she understands the emotional neglect I suffered as a child with a narcissistic dad whose dreams were more important than his own family and an angry emotionally-distant mom who never defended me or my sister when our dad was around.

On a brighter note, the one constant throughout my mental health journey has been my primary physician. We’ll call him Dr. B. Dr. B has patiently prescribed me medicine after medicine, listened to the side effects I’ve experienced from what I’m presently taking, and fixed me up with a new medication if the side effects from the current one are unsustainable. We have finally found a good combination of antidepressants and mood stabilizers, and I am grateful for the work he has put into making sure I’m steadily healing. I could have never made the progress I have if it wasn’t for him.

To finish this off, I want to be clear that the reason I am writing this article is not to garner sympathy but encourage someone—anyone—to begin the long and extremely fucking hard journey of healing from their trauma if they are on the fence. I hope that it’s clear from what’s been written above that you will struggle and relapse and want to give up sometimes. The one thing you have to do, though, is what you’ve always done: keep fucking going. You’ve made it this far, so now comes the harder part, shedding what has been ingrained in you either through a parent, a partner, a mentor, or someone worse. I’m not finished untangling the cluttered nasty insides of my trauma, but I hope that you can begin or, if you’ve already begun, continue and fight through to the end.