Love bites (So do I)

I wouldn’t know how to stop. And I don’t want to.

after school / because of you

WAVES (2019) dir. Trey Edward Shults

Alright I think this might actually be the first time for me making a thoughtful post on social media so I apologize if the cohesiveness of this post is lacking. For those that know me well, they know I don’t open up much or show any vulnerability at all, so this is pretty discomforting for me to say the least. For a while, I never discussed this even with those closest to me because I didn’t want to be a burden or cause them any worry. As uncomfortable as this is for me, I do feel inclined to talk about it now that things have changed. For the past two and a half years, I’ve been dealing with severe clinical depression. Right as high school was wrapping up is when I began to start feeling different and not like myself; I wasn’t really sure how to describe it but I just assumed everyone was feeling a similar way since we were all transitioning from high school to college and that can be a really stressful and scary time. Though, months went by, it got exponentially worse and I realized what was going on but wasn’t sure what to do. I can’t think of an eloquent way of putting this, but for a while it was really, really bad. I wasn’t getting the necessary help I needed; letting myself disassociate from people I cared about, letting myself detach from the rest of the world, letting my grades plummet, and almost dropping out of college because I just simply did not care about anything anymore. I became very apathetic towards my own well-being and my own life, but that topic is a bit too personal to discuss so candidly. Even when I did start getting better help, everything was still pretty rough. Making positive, gradual change is difficult and I was still facing serious issues even well into my second year of college (despite taking medication and doing therapy for a while at that point). Since then, it’s still been quite the rollercoaster. There are a lot of highs and lows, and it can be really hard to appreciate the highs when you know that feeling of elation is on borrowed time. I’m getting better at it though. And I’m getting better at getting through the worser depressive waves. It’s a little bit hard to put into words. Depression robs you of… a lot of things. It robs you of your happiness, your determination, your willfulness, your hopefulness, your optimism, and your entire personality, among many other things. It can feel sometimes that your brain is off, and even formulating your own thoughts is a challenge. It can make you feel insignificant, expendable, worthless, and so many more awful feelings. It paralyzes you, physically and mentally, to the point where your emptiness is indescribable. I’d love to say that I’ve conquered most of these feelings, but I haven’t. I still have quite a few black dog days. Like I said earlier, I am getting better though. I am at the best place I’ve been in a long time and I can’t express how grateful I am for it. I’m starting to appreciate life again even in the most simplistic aspects. I see everything through a different lens now and my experiences have molded me into a person today that I quite like and am really proud of. If you’ve gotten this far and are still reading this, I appreciate you. Always check in on your friends; your strongest friends, your nicest friends, your wildest friends, all of them. We tend to put up a façade in social environments of how we want to be perceived, making the detection of mental health issues hard as if finding help and dealing with them weren’t hard enough. I’m gonna finish up this post right about here cause this was a bit longer than I had anticipated it to be. Thoughtful post complete. Be there for others and be there for yourself. Peace

— Jonathan Safran Foer // Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close