I finally sought professional help for what’s been going through my mind lately. Turns out, I’m suffering from severe major depression (without psychosis), the severe part since last summer and the major depression part since middle school. I have continuous appointments with both the PhD psychologist and the nurse practitioner, the latter of which put me on Zoloft today.
I’m SO RELIEVED. Obviously, I had no idea the depression was this bad; otherwise, I would have gotten help long, long ago. Apparently, it’s kind of amazing I’ve survived without serious acts of rebellion or an eating disorder or something. I haven’t had a stable life, what with moving and switching schools and parents being AWOL and all. I focused on music, skating, volunteering, working, etc to keep from going crazy. And it worked- but I still had these cycles of unhappiness to depression and back and forth. I used to be able to pull myself out of the depression part alone, now though I guess my neurotransmitters are whacked out (hence the Zoloft.)
Life is looking up. I hope to pull my grades back up this semester; it’ll take a lot of work to actually fix my GPA, but that’s not my huge concern. I just want to get the grades I know I’m capable of getting and prove something to myself. I also opened a second savings account at the bank last month to begin my moving fund. The current plan is to leave in August for coastal North Carolina, where I’ll probably get a job and finish another semester or two at community college to build my GPA back up. After that… well, I’ll have to transfer to a 4-year university, and I haven’t really decided where; there aren’t any within a 2 hour radius of where I hope to live. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Till then, here’s to keep on keeping on… hopefully happily.
