Depression. i don't know, i guess the 1st time i noticed something was wrong was when i was 13. it was my birthday, and i was sad and for no real reason. i had been crying a lot more then i ever had. and i just became hyper sensitive to everything! i noticed all of my character flaws and short comings. on top of self esteem/image issues. and the endless bullying by both kids and adults, just reconfirmed all the feelings of inadequacy i was placing on myself.
i remember talking to a friend on the school bus who was also going through feelings of depression and her showing me huge cuts on her arms, " she said last night i tried to kill myself and my parents didn't even care! no one even noticed! i think that's when i first got the idea to cut myself... not to kill myself or to get attention, but the way the scars looked the way the skin was red and elevated and scabby, something about that image struck a chord within me. and i related to that hurt skin.
i feel like cuts and scars mean that a person had "gone through something", and even tho you don't know what the details of the "scars story" is, that there it is, an outward manifestation of trauma. a story with out words... and i think that is why i first started cutting, i didn't have words to explain my pain. i didn't understand the cause of it, but man did i feel it. and that pain kept growing and growing and building and i kept trying to push it away, or pretend nothing was wrong, because i had no words. i had no story or explanation as to why i felt what i was feeling.
so i was 13 and i made my first cut, it was the first time i had physical proof that something was wrong within me. it was easy to cover and explain away the scabs, after all, i am, and always have been extremely clumsy! so no one thought twice when they noticed a band-aid or scab . and these little lies were the beginning of me loosing grips with myself and who i was becoming. the first tendrils of my spin towards self destruction.
i am not going to go into all the details of my past, the struggles i went through or the fight i continue to face on the daily, in this post, but i just felt like when i heard this song,...it was me. so much so i wept that someone else had to have gone through similar things to be able to write such a perfectly worded lyric about what its like to live with depression/addiction and wear mask after mask. to say "i'm ok" when inside you really aren't. to want to be and do so much more then what your sickness allows you to be, or the inability to see yourself the way other people see you. ( and i am talking about the good traits people who love you see) because there are days when i feel so unlovable and so worthless and its easy to want to break down and give back into the old coping tactics in those moments.
but i have found ... there is hope, there is a healer who can help us through the darkness even if he has to help us with every step of every day. the pain might not ever go away completely but he can make it manageable. and our lives mean something. our pain and experiences can be useful to help other people...
the other day i was talking with my dad, and he said something that was really healing for my heart, he said as difficult as "that time" was in our life, and tho i would never want to go through that again, my "mental breakdown" has helped him in his callings to understand more fully and be more empathetic to, and better equipped to handle the situations and people who struggle with mental illness.
To know that God had a purpose for my pain, in even a small way to be used for good, builds my testimony that he has a plan.
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