By Matthew Ballard
Spitfire Student News
Portage Community HS
1st Place
Division 4, News Writing
Personal Narrative
Isolated. Lonely. Helpless. These words defined me as little as three years ago, but I am proud to say that they don’t today. Being able to say that today, however, has not come easy, because the disease that got me there –depression- is a formidable foe.
An Early Struggle
Even as a small child, I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. I was a very shy kid; I couldn’t talk to anybody without feeling insecure and like nobody liked me. Those feelings kept growing, and by middle school it became a daily struggle to figure out where I belonged in social circles
while wondering if anyone would ever accept me for who I am. Every day I would think to myself, “Why am I here if nobody wants to know me?”
My negative feelings grew and grew until they dominated my life. In 6th grade, I was finally formally diagnosed with depression, but at the time, I didn’t know what this word meant fully. I didn’t know that it was a word made so people could try to understand the pain a person goes through. All I knew was that it was another “label” that would distance me even more from my peers at school, which was the last thing I needed. Getting diagnosed as depressed might have actually made me more depressed, if that was possible.
One of the few things that I felt like I had going for me were my parents. They loved me unconditionally and were invested in finding an end for my discontent. They set me up with therapist after therapist -five in total- to try and help me cope with my pain, but none helped that much. I tried many, many different medications, none of which worked well enough to take my anguish and sadness away. My life was a mess literally for years.
Worsening Symptoms
At my lowest, I would not leave my house for days at a time because I was so miserable and hopeless that it was making me physically sick. This meant that I missed a lot of school, and as the days stacked up and I got farther and farther behind, I developed terrible anxiety along with my depression.
I had social anxiety at school because I was self-conscious about my absences and constantly wondering how my classmates felt about my being gone so much. It is possible in a school as big as mine that nobody even noticed, but thoughts would go through my head all day long about how they must think I’m a “freak” or “crazy.” I was so far behind in class that I felt stupid and hopeless. My anxiety followed me home, and I couldn’t sleep at night because my mind wouldn’t stop racing with horrible thoughts and hypothetical worries about bad things that might happen to me. Even if those thoughts weren’t rational, I couldn’t escape it no matter what I tried.
Eventually my lack of sleep took its toll, and the combination of depression, anxiety, and sleep deprivation turned me into a sad, angry mess with a very short fuse. I started to lash out at the only people I had left, my family. I was constantly yelling at them, throwing things, and slamming doors. My sister, a senior at the time, even had to move out and spend her senior year with our aunt because her and I got into a yelling fight that escalated into a physical altercation.
My sister and I had always been very close, and this was when I really realized that I was on a dead end road. No wonder nobody wanted to be around me. Even I hated myself.
Rock Bottom
I became hopelessly lonely without any friends or people that I felt like were close to me. I was cut off from the outside world completely. My parents, pushed to the brink, stopped coddling me and told me that we were going to try anything and everything until something worked. At one point I was taking 13 pills a day to try and regulate everything from my energy levels to my mood swings.
At the same time, we found out that I was going to have to go to the alternative high school because I was too far behind in credits to go to the regular one, where all of my friends were going. I was devastated. As if I wasn’t stigmatized enough already, now I had to go to a school for rejects. The day I found out, I seriously considered killing myself.
I had thought about ending my own life several times since my middle school years, but never had the guts to go through with it. I really felt like that night was going to be different, and I prepared carefully, said by goodbyes in a letter, and set to work. When the time came for me to complete the deed, I couldn’t go through with it, mostly because I knew how sad it would make my parents. That night, I sat in my room and cried. I was a half-grown man in high school, and I literally sobbed about so many different things. The loss of my friends, the family I had pushed away, the black hole that was my future. My feelings were too much to handle; I couldn’t handle the fact that I was toxic not just to myself, but to everyone around me.
A New Outlook
From that moment on, accepted the idea that I would never be happy again as a fact, and I began to work on making other people happy instead.I did everything I could to get a smile out of any single person I could find that was willing to have a conversation with me. Any smile or laughter I could get from someone would reassure me, even if just for that second, that I had a reason to be here, even if it was just for someone else’s happiness. I nurtured the tiny flame of hope in my heart that someday I would matter to someone, sometime. Making others happy became my only reason for my existing. I didn’t know it at the time, but losing the focus on myself was what would allow me to ultimately find myself, and the Community High School was the perfect place to do that.
A Fresh Start
I carried all of my depression and anxiety with me to Community High School, but within the first week it was apparent that it didn’t have to define me. I found a friend group right away and connected with all of my teachers, who would actually call home a few minutes after class started if I wasn’t there. That made me actually want to come to school, and before long, I was earning all As. I joined the newspaper staff and found not just a class, but a second family. I won the first school awards of my life at MIPA Spring Conference. I am graduating in four months. Two years late, but better late than never.
Reality
People who don’t understand depression would think my story stops there, that I found myself and a new school and the fog of darkness that had been hanging over my life miraculously lifted. Unfortunately, that’s not how mental illness works. I still actually live with much of the worry and sadness that I have always had, but now I have better coping skills and support systems to deal with those emotions.
That is not to say that I don’t still fail. I was the first Michigan student to have my tuition paid to go to MIPA supper camp on SponsorMe, and when the time came to go, I stayed for the first day and then snuck home without telling anyone. My social anxiety was too great for me to be that far from home without anyone I knew, especially because I am from a small, alternative school news program. There were more people at camp than that go to my school, and I couldn’t take it. I knew this had happened to people from our school in the past and I was determined not to let my school and adviser down. I was so ashamed. Things got worse at the end of the summer when one of our editors, who had just graduated, committed suicide. He was my workstation partner the year before and we were close, and I was afraid that I was spiraling out of control again. Fortunately, school started, and my support network stopped my from plunging into my dark places again.
In the end, it wasn’t a therapist or a pill that helped me get where I am today, it was love and learning how to put myself last, and this is something that I will never forget no matter where my life -and quest to enhance the lives of others- takes me, and I sincerely hope that others who read this who struggle in the ways that I have can leave these pages with hope.