Like everything in life, my story is constantly being written, but here’s the story of what brought me to this point in my life.
I have struggled my whole life with underlying anxiety, but over time, found loopholes to keep myself functioning. However, with covid, quarantine, and online school, all of my bad feelings and intrusive thoughts just multiplied and multiplied. Throughout all of this, I never said a word to my family, friends, or even doctor. I kept it all inside (DO NOT DO THIS) and in conclusion, I felt strong and persistent feelings of isolation, chronic sadness, and a lot of anxiety.
When I first brought up anything about my feelings to my parents, I told them I thought I had ADHD. At that time, my brother was diagnosed with ADHD, (now my sister is also diagnosed with it), so this felt like a safe way to reach out for help without creating too much alarm. However, my plan backfired because my parents immediately dismissed my proposition without a second thought. From what they, and everyone else, could tell, I had great grades, spent hours studying a day, was a high performing athlete, and acted completely normal. At first, when they shut me down, I was very discouraged. I felt like my feelings were invalid and that there was just something wrong with me that was unfixable. However, as the feelings were getting worse and worse, it was becoming increasingly more difficult to focus in school, which resulted in my grades slipping and the perfectionist I am, that made me more anxious and I forced myself to study constantly, driving myself into the ground, and digging myself into a bigger and bigger hole.
Somewhere around winter of freshman year, I finally told my mom that this was something we cannot ignore, I’m having a really hard time focusing in school and I need to get tested for ADHD/ADD. She finally agreed and took me to my pediatrician to do some form-like tests. The results were probably what I was expecting, but not what I wanted to see: anxiety and minor depression. This started a whole process of anxiety meds, finding a therapist, and many, many check-ins with my doctor and parents. Yay I was getting help! All was going to be well! Absolutely not. The meds decreased my anxiety a little, but multiplied my depression by crazy amounts. I hated my therapist, began self-harming, and worst of all, again, kept it all holed up inside.
**TRIGGER WARNING: if you’re gonna get triggered by self-harm please skip this paragraph, I’ll do a little recap for you so you don’t miss anything: basically my parents found out about all my underlying issues that I was not telling them and everything came out all at once. It was really difficult for me. Eventually, they decided to put me in a PHP program to help me with my issues. Now skip past this part please!!! (it shows you where to start again)
Ok. The most vivid day of my life. The day everything came spilling out. Probably the hardest day of my life so far:
It was the middle of the online school day (maybe during lunch or something). I was studying for math on the floor of my office where I did all my schoolwork. I was so anxious (at this point it was just a constant state of fidgeting and thoughts going a mile a minute) and felt so trapped in my skin. My brain was at a block. I could see the math problems in front of me but that was about it. Starting to solve the problem (or do any school work for that matter) felt like a chore as big as solving climate change. As if some unknown force was controlling me, I got up from my seat on the floor, opened the office door, walked the short distance to the kitchen. I eyed the knife block on our kitchen counter and walked over, then picked up the biggest knife in there. I stood in the silent kitchen, I remember this like it was yesterday (unfortunately), mentally trying to figure out what place I could cut myself that would make me feel the most pain. After mentally running through all the options, I decided on my chest (jeez I am shaking writing this). Knife pointed straight at my heart, I began digging into my chest. As soon as the knife broke the first surface of my skin, I broke down into tears and panicked sobs. What the fuck was happening to me? But I couldn’t put the knife down. Finally, I forced myself to unstick the knife from my hand, because at this point, my tears were coming down so fast I could barely even see, and I was in a panicked meltdown (now I know this was a huge anxiety attack). I decided to go outside to get some fresh air, so I went outside to my patio and laid on our outside couch, hyperventilating, internally and externally panicking, and sobbing. What I didn’t think about at that point in time was that my mom’s home office window on the second floor was open. My sobs must have been too loud because all the sudden she bursts through the patio door from inside the house and runs over to me. “What’s wrong? What happened? What’s going on?” I remember so clearly my horrible feeling of shame, anger, embarrassment, and frustration. I couldn’t even get words out because I didn’t know where to begin. Anyway, she couldn’t get anything out of me so she told me to go on a walk around the block and she was going to call my therapist. I came back after walking (which to be fair, I really didn’t want to do but it did calm me down significantly) and walked into a room with my two painfully scared parents and my therapist on Zoom. I wouldn’t tell the story in front of my parents, so I made them leave the room, and then I spilled everything to my therapist (which I didn’t even like so that shows how much all of this stuff was just wanting to explode out of me). Then after probably a half an hour, my parents came back into the room. My therapist (damn her) made me share the story again with my parents, and at points I was being untruthful or not telling the whole story, she would interrupt and tell them the full horror of my story. It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. After hours of discussion, me sobbing, my parents crying, and my therapist kinda just sitting there trying to mediate the situation, we decided I probably had to go somewhere, and the solution was PHP (sidebar for definition of PHP: according to Google, “‘PHP’ stands for ‘Partial Hospitalization Program,’ which refers to a structured, intensive outpatient treatment program that provides a higher level of care than standard outpatient therapy”). Fuck. I felt so helpless. I felt like all my security was stripped from me. I felt like a bird who had just gotten all its feathers picked off and was now naked, left to shiver in the cold. I felt ashamed. I felt terrible for the reaction my parents had to hearing my story, how they cried and cried, so worried about their daughter that looked completely fine from the outside. That was a Thursday, and the following Monday, I had my first day of PHP at Compass.
**people who skipped, start again here**
To make it all worse, the whole week was high school soccer tryouts. As a freshman who had devoted so much time to soccer, I had a lot of pressure on me to make varsity, and my self-confidence was actually a negative amount so I wasn’t even playing well and I was stressed out of my mind. And to top it all off, my first day of PHP was also the day (after PHP) that I would find out what soccer team I made. This was probably the second hardest day of my life lol after the other one that had literally happened a few days before (tough week.).
I can’t even begin to describe my experience at Compass. At first, I felt uncomfortable there. The first day was really hard. I had to meet all of these new doctors and therapists – my “team” for the next few weeks. I met a bunch of kids in situations similar and different from mine. It was weird being there. Honestly just weird. But truly such a life changing experience. As I became more comfortable at Compass, I ended up creating relationships with so many special and amazingly unique people that I never would have known. The experience was all so surreal, and even now it feels that way. I was living two completely different lives (and people who have also been to PHP please say you agree with me). There was the really messed up part of me that I was working every day to fix at Compass, and then there was the part of me that still had to act “normal” outside of PHP, with my friends, and in public (my friends knew I was there but I still felt like I couldn’t show it sometimes). My time at Compass took me to almost the end of the school year, I was there for about five weeks. There, I discovered what having a good therapist was like (sorry Caryn lol), an amazing psychiatrist, better meds (got them changed right away thankfully), and a lifestyle where I wasn’t so stressed about school, grades, and tests every second of every day. I almost felt relaxed and need I say, happy? Almost.
When I came out of Compass, it was the end of the school year and we didn’t have finals so it was all pretty chill and then it was time to go to camp. Everyone around me was so excited; we hadn’t been there in almost two years! However, I felt so messed up in the brain because for some reason, I really did not want to go back to camp. Looking back at this feeling, the issue wasn’t that I didn’t like camp. I think the issue was that I did love it. So much. I knew I was going to be happy at camp and for some reason, my depressed brain didn’t want that for me. I went anyway and holy shit did it change everything. For the first time in over a year, I was genuinely happy. Needless to say, over the eight weeks I still had some low points. Hiding to have a mental breakdown where no one could find me, strong, strong urges to self-harm, and of course, weekly calls with my therapist. Besides that, the summer was so truly amazing and I came back from camp a changed person.
Another huge change was… I finally got a new therapist!!! YAY! And let me tell you, that was a fucking game changer. Game. Changer. She’s my therapist now and she has helped me so much. I can’t even begin to explain it. She is actually the one who pushed me to start this blog. Without her, I would not be as far along in my recovery as I am today. Needless to say, my mental health journey has not stopped there. I am still depressed and very anxious, and guess what? Full circle moment: I was diagnosed with ADD! lol.
In conclusion I guess from that whole long story, first off I hope it reached you in some way, if you related to at least some point, or maybe if it inspired you to reach out for help of your own. I am so thankful for my story that has led me to who I am today. I hope you all, if you haven’t already, can come to a point where you’re proud of your own story, not embarrassed about your issues or scared of sharing them with people for them to think differently of you. Trust me, I’ve been there, and I’m here to tell you that it’s worth it. I am still ways away from full recovery, but that wouldn’t have happened unless I let people into my life. Fully. Not just into the pretty parts. Even this blog is a huge step out of my comfort zone (I guess only if people actually read it), where I share with everyone the non-pretty parts of my life. I hope you all will tag along with me and my journey. Or if you don’t want to, that’s okay too. Anyway, thanks for reading. It means a lot to me.
-Avery
Mentally, I’m Here 