I’m sure that many people reading this can relate to a time, a time where life felt so dark, it was as if it had only ever been this way. When the feeling of euphoric happiness seems so out of reach, that even though you know you’ve felt it before; you couldn’t possibly imagine how.
Before the summer of 2017, I got myself expelled. Up until this point, I had great grades, friends who were genuinely close to me, a passion for hockey and art, and my biggest concern was doing my Spanish homework in time. In popular slang, I was probably considered a ‘nerd’. I’d felt invisible for years and couldn’t understand why people didn’t like me more, and was resentful because of it. Looking back, I can see why this led me to get so caught up in partying, rebelling, and popularity when it finally came to me- because I felt I was owed it, I had been deprived until now. It was also novelty. I felt like I’d spent enough time reading in my bedroom and, without intention, completely flipped my priorities on their head.
The expulsion wasn’t for anything dramatic; no setting the gym on fire or locking a teacher in a cupboard. Despite this, Edinburgh is an unusually close-knit environment to grow up in, and when people aren’t sure of the whole story, they fill in the blanks themselves, because its better than not getting to relay the story at all. The rumours and stories that I was hearing about myself were insanity but it was too late, I’d been out of the city all summer to ‘reset’, and they’d had time to solidify in people’s minds.
I took some time out of the city during the aftermath, and when I came home, my phone was a continual flow of notifications. My friends, people I knew very little, people I didn’t know at all, were bombarding me with sympathy, faux-care, verbal abuse. I can admit, its not common for a fairly non-threatening, book loving young girl to be kicked out of a well-reputed school and I now felt like the entire city were my own, personal judge and jury.
This is when my emotional state began spiraling. Leaving the house became an anxiety-ridden challenge; I started developing panic attacks if I saw people I knew in public, I hardly ate, I couldn’t go on public transport anymore, and I felt incredibly, incredibly isolated.
My parents wanted to keep me away from the crowd I was in at my old school, the best friends I’d had for four years. The friends I’d had since childhood were told by their families to cut me off, they didn’t want any association with my new reputation as a ‘train wreck’. And then, I got sent to boarding school, and just when I felt like life couldn’t possible be any bleaker, I lost my parents and siblings. I had literally slam dunked the self-destruct button.
At the point of arriving at my new school, where of course, there was already an excess of fabrication and opinions as to why I had come, I found myself in a depressive state. The thing is, even though I could feel it happening, a part of me didn’t even think my self was worth trying to save. I didn’t feel as though anyone even liked me, let alone love me, so who would even care? I saw myself as a failure who had torn apart my prospects before I’d even had a chance to explore them, and for that reason, felt minimal inspiration to climb out of the bed I’d made for myself. I would fantasize constantly about making everyone regret treating me this way, talking about me this way, looking at me this way. I lived in an angry conviction that I somehow had to find a way to show them how their ‘harmless gossiping’ had
destroyed my personality. I think I subconsciously began to fulfill the role of the person everyone thought I was, meaning I not only completely lost sight of myself, it also just gave precedent for my destructive behaviour to continue.
It had been two years straight of feeling like this, and although I knew I had to get myself back, I couldn’t imagine myself ever being happy. Of course, I had been, but every happy time or memories only seemed as bleak as the world I was in now, I couldn’t even vaguely stimulate the feelings of serotonin I needed so I couldn’t really envision any kind of optimistic future that could keep me going. Depression is an overwhelming nothingness. It’s a claustrophobia, as though you are feeling every sense and emotion possible at once, yet at the same time, feel absolutely nothing at all. The things I once loved became mundane and any sense of ambition that had previously epitomised my character, ceased; a future became impossible to work towards because I truly believed that I didn’t have one.
My saving graces came in the form of five of the greatest women I have ever known, the five girls who didn’t care what they’d heard about me, they cared about what they felt. They never knew how bad things were, but they didn’t have too either. I didn’t share, not because I didn’t trust them or we weren’t close enough, but because I didn’t want to taint their lives when their simple existence was already doing enough in breaking my continuum of semi-consciousness.
A couple of weeks before my 17th birthday, I was sat cross-legged on the floor, staring at my bookcase with no intent of picking one up (because I’d become too depressed to read or write- my two only passions), and for no particular reason, had been crying for four hours straight. My incomplete UCAS form was in front of me. ‘Where do you see yourself in 10 years?’ Nowhere. I had felt everything, every little piece of myself withering away. If I’d found an apple decaying in the fruit bowl downstairs, I would have destroyed it, thrown away the root of nastiness before it could infect the untainted fruit around it. It just made sense.
My best friend found me, a sticky mess, and I’ll always live with the guilt of leaving her with that imprint of me when I had completely given up. It had finally happened, yet, somehow, hitting this borderline- clichéd rock bottom, gave me a completely fresh perspective. Firstly, company. I was hardly ever left by myself for a long time, and although this would have sounded like my worst nightmare as a self- proclaimed ‘alone-timer’, forcing myself to be surrounded with other people simply gave me less time to be thinking about myself and how I was feeling. I was living actively in the hours that I would have usually been psycho-analysing myself, and utilising my social battery would naturally tire my mind out, gradually allowing me to have less run-away thought tangents and my brain, which never shut up, became quieter and quieter. The second, writing. My depression had given me writers block for 2 years… which had me feel even more depressed. Instead of trying to force myself to become immersed back into my hobbies straight away, I took a different angle, and whenever I started to feel sad, would try and articulate it into words as accurately as I could. It made me see my emotions as a challenge instead of a burden, something I could control and work around, not something that controlled me. Finding an outlet for my emotional state meant that every time I felt bad, it could be channeled into something beneficial (whether that’s writing, a painting, a run), and I began to see that the negative didn’t have to be definitive, and I could manipulate my experience to my advantage. Thirdly, self-reformation. I held a lot of anger which had built up over the course of many years, and it started to be consuming. I still felt like, in some senses, I had been mistreated, but the ideology of making them ‘guilty’ by destroying myself more was abandoned. I undertook meditation and consciously channeled
all my resentment into thinking of ways to ‘prove them wrong’, instead of succumbing to the expectations that had already been set. This helped me be able to start envisioning a future for myself again, and with this, I gradually reconnected with the dreams and aspirations that I knew were buried deep within. It didn’t happen at once, it was a process, not an instantaneous change. And since, there have been relapses. But now I understand how to pull myself back out of it, and over time, have become a different person.
