Being home is always hard, not that it's bad, just that it is such a different place. it's a place where parts of me walk on egg shells. i absolutely love being with my siblings. more and more i realize how lucky i am to have them (which says a lot because i cannot remember not being grateful for them). but i guess i feel like the broken child. i use to try so hard to be the "okay" child, i was good at school, i was in the marching band, i took pictures and ate with my family. i didn't want them to know that i was fractured.
obviously my plan didn't work out. when i first talked to my parents about being depressed, it was my first semester of college. i think my mom understood that it was something deep, but for a long time it felt like my dad just thought i was mourning the loss of my boyfriend. that was hardly the beginning of it. he got me prescriptions of cymbalta (depression hurts, cymbalta did not help), but talked about it like it was just something to help me while i was stuck, told me i could just take it for a few months.
three and a half years and 6 antidepressants, 2 mood stablizers, and 5 sleeping meds later and i'm still stuck. obviously i've been in worse places than i am now and perhaps a few better along the way, but even with my hindsight bias, i feel like a dark cloud followed me even through the good times.
my exboyfriend once told me that he didn't understand why i was so sad all the time, and that maybe i was doing it to myself. it seems like, given my circumstances (a wonderful family, caring friends, a good education, an amazing girlfriend), there is no reason for me to be so unhappy. could it be me? why would i do it to myself? i can't let myself believe that that is true. that's just like "choosing to be gay". why would someone choose to be discriminated against? why would i choose to hurt?
i know that there good and bad decisions that i've made along the way, but i never once thought to myself "maybe i'll just try to make things a litte worse". there were somethings i knew were bad for me, but they all had/have their purpose. my eating disorder was a way to cope while holding on to the "okay child" title, self-injury was less obvious than my eating disorder and made me feel when i felt numb. it felt like the ends justified the means. although now i can see that the ends might have been better had i not picked up my maladaptive coping mechanisms.
in the grand scheme of things... how much of it is my doing? it's obviously all my responsibility, but for the longest time i've wanted to know how much of it is organic. how much of it is something that's biologically wrong with me?
