6 december 2015 22.11

Post meant for Facebook that never got published:

"I don't feel like posting this extremely private post and writing this I haven't yet decided if I will. But something inside me tells me that my story might make a difference. No matter how small maybe to only one single person. So maybe in the end of writing this I will build up the courage and share it with you. The most vulnerable words I've ever written at the most vulnerable time of my life.

I got my first depression in 8th grade and was taken out of school the last months of that year. I was taken to a psychiatrist who put me on medicine that I ate for almost 10 years and that I never felt helped me. From that time and until the beginning of my twenties I struggled on and off with depression, an eating disorder, anxiety and an extreme feeling of self hatred and low self esteem. I was strong enough to stay away from alcohol, drugs, cutting and vomiting after my extreme eating orgies. I knew if I went down those paths I wouldn't be able to stop. 

I've always reflected a lot upon life and I've always had a deep insight about myself, my life and the people and situations that surrounded me. 

I always had great plans for my future and daydreaming and believing in miracles in many ways helped me trough. I had strategies to get back up, that included setting new goals in life and being physically active. I've always worked well when I had a goal to reach.

My early twenties until last year came with a lot of challenges but  also with an abundance of love and joy and I grew stronger and stronger and worked everyday towards my dreams and my goal to be the person who ended all the emotional suffering that I always knew I'd inherited from my mothers side of the family. Depression was gone, so was my self hatred and my self esteem was getting better and better. I thought that I had endured difficulties for many lifetimes and that those struggles was gone forever.  

Last year I got severely sick but I never realized it then. I have actually never seen myself as sick until this point. I've always felt that as a highly sensitive person I was reacting strongly to the circumstances of my life. And depending on your perspective that is true. Society set the standards of what's a disease and what is not, and being highly sensitive in this wold is a challenge in itself. 

During the stresses of studying very hard to get qualified for university, preparing for a fitness competition and other stresses in life, I got some mood swings, physical symptoms and I had days where I was very euforic. I thought the different symptoms was due to my competition prep and being a very positive and outgoing person I believed I was just being ecstatic over reaching my goals and dreams in life. Now I can see that I had days where I think I was experiencing a hypomanic state, which is a light state of mania where you feel extreme happiness, heightened state of well being and connectedness with nature, life and people around you. 

When I started at university last year I was exhausted from the long period of physical and psychological stress and pushing thru an extremely hard education of biochemistry just made it worse. But I was determined to make it as always and I thought all my symptoms was due to stress and not the onset of depression. I now see how all this have been the trigger of a major depression. I'm quite certain that I suffer from bipolar disorder type 2, with severe depressions an only few episodes of hypomania, but the psychiatrists and psychologists I've talked to think that the hypomanic episodes I experienced was triggered by severe stress and not due to a bipolar disorder. They gave me the diagnosis of depression and anxiety. 

I thought I had experienced the lowest of the low and the most traumatizing anxiety, but I hadn't. But now I have and I live thought it every single day and I have been for months. Thru last year I got worse and worse and in the first months of this year I started not to be able to function very well. I can't put into words what I've gone thru and what I'm going thru but nightmare feels almost like an understatement. 

For weeks and weeks I haven't slept thru a night because I can get intense feelings of fear suddenly without no reason. I can feel loneliness that is absolutely heartbreaking and unbearable and that makes me want to disappear every instant. I feel such immense sadness that I can cry a whole night without being able to stop, trying to comfort myself holding myself while I shiver and turn out of intense physical pain in my chest. 

I'm so nauseous 24/7 I feel I'm gonna vomit all the time and that makes it really hard to eat even though I force myself every day. My legs are shaking every day and my muscles spasms. When I do some light exercise like walking on the treadmill or biking on a stationary bike I feel like I'm about to faint the whole way thru it. 

My mind is spinning a lot and it makes me freeze where I sit, captured by my thoughts, all the time. I can sit on my toilet for ages sometimes not being able to move for all the inner activity in my head. Or on my bed or on the floor. 

I've had suicidal thoughts every day and often all day since this summer, because who can bare living like this. It's not living. It's barley surviving being tormented all the way.. 

Still I've managed to get up and get out, put on my makeup and my brave face. I force myself to eat. I keep on walking on the treadmill even when my legs shake and my vision turns black for a second. 

Mental illness is an illness just like any other.  You can't help getting it and you can't help being ill. Just as you can't make yourself snap out of cancer you can't make yourself snap out of depression. There is a lot of treatments but no real cure and there is so much we don't know of the psycological, social and biological reasons to depression. 

As I'm suffering the people who love me and who I love beyond this world suffer as well. If it wasn't for all of you I wouldn't endure. ❤️

When you go thru such a nightmare that you get suicidal the only thing that get you thru the minutes and hours and days are the people you love. No suicidal person wants to die. You only want to end your extreme suffering. And all you think of all day long is the people you love and the people you would leave behind. It's the worst of all dilemmas. Your peace and their grief, or your suffering and their wellbeing. It sounds insane to a healthy person but that's what you feel and think when you're balancing at the edge of despair. 

You can't see through the smile of a person what pain that haunts on the inside. Don't judge, don't try to fix it or try to fully understand it, because you can't, and that's ok. Just be there. Listen and share your love. 

Being a daughter of a mother who had many severe depressions I know both sides of this awful disease. I know how heartbreaking it is to be on the outside, helpless, devastated, not knowing what to do or say, being afraid to loose the person you love the most to suicide. I now also know it from the inside. The unbearable pain and suffering, the wish for it all to stop and the guilt and sorrow you feel for all the pain your disease causes all the people you love. 

I would say that depression is the worst disease there is. Robbing you from all your life force, vitality, ability to feel joy and happiness and putting you thru a real hell of extreme physical and emotional unbearable feelings. Our mind is everything. It controls everything we do. It sets us up for the possibility for a good life thru our willpower to reach our goals and dreams, our ability to share love and laughs with our loved ones and the capacity to feel joy and satisfaction, wellbeing and just peace. Without all that life is not living, life is just surviving. 

Be grateful for your health, life and sanity, because some day it might not be there. Say to the people you love that you love them and feel that love in your heart with joy everyday. Life is hard, sometimes to hard, but it's always beautiful. Because in the darkest of darkness there is always a light. And that light is the light of love. That connects us all forever and ever. And that makes this place perfect even in it's imperfection. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_depression_the_secret_we_share

The man in this talk describes depression perfectly. I recognize my struggles in every word he says. Please take time to see it, at least the first part. Even if you, hopefully, haven't experienced it yourself, maybe you know of someone who is fighting this disease in this very moment. Or one day you will meet someone. 

You might not be able to cure your friend, family member or somebody you know with depression, but by spreading the word the world can become a place with more understanding and less judgment and there can be a greater awareness and less of a stigma talking about this horrible disease. 

And one last thing.

If you've lost somebody to suicide or you know of somebody who lost their life this way. 

It wasn't your fault, you couldn't have done something differently, you couldn't have saved them. 

They weren't selfish people taking the easy way out. They were suffering in a way no person should never have to suffer and in a way few people will ever fully understand, and they just couldn't take it anymore. 

They loved you deeply and you were the reason they held on for so long. And whatever you might believe in, life is eternal. That persons soul is watching over you every single day. And you will be together again until eternity. ❤️"