As a child I lived in darkness and filth. My mother was a hoarder, an alcoholic, and suffered from mental illness - probably a personality disorder of some sort. While she loved me very much, she was psychologically abusive to me and created an environmentally-hostile home for me to live in. She spent many daylight hours asleep, but I wasn't allowed to play outside because she was afraid something would happen to me.
Because there wasn't food in the house, I often wound up eating slices of bread flavored with soy sauce while watching TV literally surrounded by trash in a dark house, hiding from the doorbell when my friends would try to invite me to play outside. When my mother was awake, she was online talking to her friends on the 1986 version of the Internet, alternately drinking and vomiting.
I had been a happy and intelligent child, but after my mom fell apart, I slowly shut down different parts of my mind and personality. School become torture for me because my mom could never get me there on time, because I was filthy, because I had no place to study and no way to concentrate. I tried to be sick as often as I could.
Where I had once been a good student, I began receiving my first D's. For some reason, none of my teachers stepped in, except to scold me for being late so often, as though I had control of that. A nine-year-old cannot drive herself to school any more than she can make her mother stop throwing up to leave on time.
In order to stay sane in an environment literally packed with trash and other clutter, I stopped seeing details and would simply gloss over any view or subject matter I encountered. In order to simply get through each day of my childhood, I stopped seeing the world around me and lived in a state of semi-conscious foggy sleep.
It was the only defense mechanism I had within my control. Essentially, I psychologically hibernated until I could find a safe space within which to resume my awareness.
A person cannot live in such a state without losing hope and self-esteem. And a child cannot find her way out of it without someone to show her how. Without any such guide, I spent my teen years believing that I was stupid and unlikeable. Any adjectives you could use to describe our home - miserable, filthy, dark, smelly – I personified within my own self-identity.
Every school year, I'd start with hope that things would be different each year – that I'd be different. I'd study! I'd do my homework! I wouldn't forget things anymore! But weeks into each year, I found myself confused and frustrated with myself for never being able to complete things.
Truthfully, I hated myself for it. I gave up the idea of going to university directly after high school. While I attended junior college for a little while, I never really believed I was worth it, so I allowed myself to do poorly until I dropped out completely. Instead, I married the wrong person and became a mother. As it turns out, having children woke me up from the horrors of my childhood.
Being a mother forced me to reexamine myself, and my beliefs. I was still very much consciously asleep, but I knew that I needed to make things better for my children than they had been for me. I looked at the things in my childhood that I liked and did not like, and I made the changes in myself and in my life to become the mother I wanted to be and the mother I should have had.
Leap by leap, I woke up and found out that I was wrong about many of my previous perceptions about myself.
A few years ago, I read something online from a person comparing her depression medications to wearing glasses for the first time. She said that before she put her glasses on, she never knew that trees were made up of individual leaves – all she could see was a green blob.
Before she tried anti-depression medications, she believed she was a lazy person who couldn't be bothered to do things right and this made her hate herself. After the meds, she was able to see clearly for the first time that she wasn't lazy; she was depressed. She wasn't a bad person; her brain just wasn't working right.
Reading this changed me instantly. In one moment, I finally realized that all my failures as a child and teenager and young adult weren't about me being bad. They were symptoms of depression I was suffering as a result of an abusive childhood. My intentions and efforts were genuine; I was merely struggling against a dysfunctional neurological system; one that was damaged in childhood.
When a child is born with a weak eye, they need early intervention to strengthen it because if the brain doesn't receive information from it, it will eventually give up and prune off the neurons that deliver information from the eye to the brain's vision centers so that, eventually, even corrective lenses won't help because the brain is not receiving the information.
This is why you sometimes see very young children with band-aid-type eye patches. They wear them over their good eye for a prescribed amount of hours each day to make the brain strengthen those neural connections. This is one example of how the brain changes physically in response to stimuli.
There is also a known genetic link for mental disorders. This is another way that depression may be physical. In addition to that, in recent years there has been proof that trauma alters our genes and that these genes can then be passed onto our children. Perhaps whatever trauma occurred in my mother's childhood was passed onto me, making me more predisposed to struggle with depression than I otherwise would have been.
The important thing to remember is that brains are a physiological part of our bodies, and just like any other part of our bodies, sometimes they don't function the way they should.
For me, depression is like walking through a swamp. It isn't about sadness so much as it is about exhaustion. Even the smallest chore feels like running a marathon. When I am struggling with a bad day or week of depression, my brain tells my body and me lies about how hard things are and it also tells me lies about me.
Now that I understand what depression is, and especially, now that I understand that it is absolutely not a choice I am making, I can wait out the lies that my brain tells me and I know that the next day, my brain probably won't tell me those lies. I keep moving forward through depression, I just do it more slowly.
Certainly there are times when people use depression as a psychological game, or a crutch, or a suit of armor. These are all dysfunctional methods that people sometimes use to avoid dealing with harder emotional work. In psychiatry, they talk about "helpful thoughts" instead of "good" or "positive" ones.
This acknowledges that not all correct thoughts are good or positive, but that thoughts can be helpful or not helpful. Using anything as a shield in this way is always ultimately unhelpful. But it is not at all limited to depression. People can and do use anything at all as an excuse to not to the hard work.
To single out those who struggle with depression is to perpetuate the stigma, and it does nothing to change those who are not yet willing to face the fact that they are playing a psychological game. I know this is a brain disorder and not a habit because I have been able to throw off all the other bad interpersonal communications habits I learned as a child and teenager. But the depression remains.
I have a chronic disease called depression. I receive no rewards for it, only shame from both the world and from my own brain. When I am having a depressive episode, everything is harder than it should be, and I struggle with my feelings about myself. But I am here. I am succeeding.
I am a single mother of two children providing love and opportunities for them that they deserve. I am a student who has received a 3.99 GPA since I've been back in college, and I am about to transfer to a university to finally complete my degree.
I am a feminist who has been working for ten years with women's issues and my work on body image has been featured in the London Guardian, the Today Show, The Orange County Register, various international documentaries, and more.
I have a chronic disease called depression, and it is real and I battle it every day. I won't ever let it win, but because of the abuse I suffered as a child and the way my brain is now wired, I will probably always battle it.
