Life Before
I thought it was a quite a good life before it all started… I had just moved into my own place. Independence at last! It was good, I had everything just the way I wanted it, and was finally muting my pink bathroom into a pink and blue one… much more subtle. It was January, I had just come back from spending Christmas and New Year in Mackay, and was getting ready for my final year of university. It was going to be a big year – I was going to cram in ten subjects to finish my Bachelor of Business Management – specialising in International Business – and my Bachelor of Arts, majoring in French and International Relations. Then it was on to the big bad corporate world, make lots of money, travel a lot, live the high life. I had just finished a five subject semester, with a grade point average of 6.25 (my best ever). All of this was made even more impressive (toot toot goes my horn) by the fact that I had been working two jobs as well. Your usual busy busy stressed little overachiever.
Happy? Kinda. I thought I should be, anyway. I had the things I wanted, independence (at the cost of all my free time trying to keep my head financially above water, but still… I had it!), my own place, a plan to finish uni and begin working, ambition, go-go, results, achievement. Unfortunately, along with all this was a huge amount of loneliness – that I relatively successfully told myself that I didn’t really have. The closest thing I had to a best friend, Hayley, was always an on-again off-again sort of relationship, and my good friend Jacqui, who was, in retrospect, a far better and more reliable friend, was about to head off to France for six months on exchange – a trip she had been saving for for ages and truly deserved.
I was sad? no, not sad, just a little selfishly anxious about Jacqui leaving, and for some obscure reason that I have never found out, Hayley decided she no longer wanted to talk to me or see me after I returned from my Christmas break from Mackay, and I had decided not to pursue it.
At around this time I also caught up with my ex-boyfriend, Richard, before he went to America for a year for work.
Talking with him the way it always had been reinforced the fact that I had no ‘best friend’ any more – no one to tell absolutely everything, work off all the stuff that was in my mind and bothering me, no one to laugh and cry with. And suddenly, here was the person I had shared so much with, who knew me so well, whom I knew so well, and we were talking like we’d never been apart, and I realised that there was something fairly major missing in my life. The important part of life, the relationships, the friendships and the sharing and caring just weren't there.
I was creating the lifestyle I thought I should have, but it wasn’t enough. It was empty and it was lonely – very lonely.
I have a history of depression. I am usually a very happy sort of person, no one would call me a ‘depressed’ kind of person, but I have suffered from depression. My choice of words there is deliberate – I firmly believe that depression is an illness and not a ‘state of mind’ that you can just ‘snap out of’ or ‘think positive’! So after two weeks of familiar symptoms – continuous bursting into tears at the slightest thing, lack of desire to get out of bed, no motivation, lack of caring about what was going on, no motivation to study, cook, or clean – I knew that I was back in the land of depression. I went to the doctor (a new GP, one I had never seen before), and he diagnosed reactive depression – reactive meaning that I was reacting to seeing Rich, the fact that Jacqui was leaving, the fact that Hayley was doing goodness knows what, the fact that I live alone and my parents and family are so far away. It almost felt like a failure – I couldn’t do it alone, I needed anti-depressants to get through it.
Would that that was all he diagnosed…
I don’t imagine that it’s easy for a GP to come across a new patient who is depressed, and then find out that you now have to tell her that she has cancer as well… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Happy? Kinda. I thought I should be, anyway. I had the things I wanted, independence (at the cost of all my free time trying to keep my head financially above water, but still… I had it!), my own place, a plan to finish uni and begin working, ambition, go-go, results, achievement. Unfortunately, along with all this was a huge amount of loneliness – that I relatively successfully told myself that I didn’t really have. The closest thing I had to a best friend, Hayley, was always an on-again off-again sort of relationship, and my good friend Jacqui, who was, in retrospect, a far better and more reliable friend, was about to head off to France for six months on exchange – a trip she had been saving for for ages and truly deserved.
I was sad? no, not sad, just a little selfishly anxious about Jacqui leaving, and for some obscure reason that I have never found out, Hayley decided she no longer wanted to talk to me or see me after I returned from my Christmas break from Mackay, and I had decided not to pursue it.
At around this time I also caught up with my ex-boyfriend, Richard, before he went to America for a year for work.
Talking with him the way it always had been reinforced the fact that I had no ‘best friend’ any more – no one to tell absolutely everything, work off all the stuff that was in my mind and bothering me, no one to laugh and cry with. And suddenly, here was the person I had shared so much with, who knew me so well, whom I knew so well, and we were talking like we’d never been apart, and I realised that there was something fairly major missing in my life. The important part of life, the relationships, the friendships and the sharing and caring just weren't there.
I was creating the lifestyle I thought I should have, but it wasn’t enough. It was empty and it was lonely – very lonely.
I have a history of depression. I am usually a very happy sort of person, no one would call me a ‘depressed’ kind of person, but I have suffered from depression. My choice of words there is deliberate – I firmly believe that depression is an illness and not a ‘state of mind’ that you can just ‘snap out of’ or ‘think positive’! So after two weeks of familiar symptoms – continuous bursting into tears at the slightest thing, lack of desire to get out of bed, no motivation, lack of caring about what was going on, no motivation to study, cook, or clean – I knew that I was back in the land of depression. I went to the doctor (a new GP, one I had never seen before), and he diagnosed reactive depression – reactive meaning that I was reacting to seeing Rich, the fact that Jacqui was leaving, the fact that Hayley was doing goodness knows what, the fact that I live alone and my parents and family are so far away. It almost felt like a failure – I couldn’t do it alone, I needed anti-depressants to get through it.
Would that that was all he diagnosed…
I don’t imagine that it’s easy for a GP to come across a new patient who is depressed, and then find out that you now have to tell her that she has cancer as well… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
posted by Jessie at 12:04 pm
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