Snapshots

You don’t know when or why it started. People ask you about it sometimes when you mention that you have suffered from depression. You give them some bullshit answer about it being a delayed reaction to your parents’ divorce. You’ve always been slow on the uptake, you say, making them laugh and tell you a story about a time that they were being slow with hilarious results. You’re glad they dropped the topic. You don’t tell them that you’ve barely received help for it. You don’t tell them that you’ve never really stopped suffering from it. It hurts to talk about it. You’re glad they dropped the topic. But the question stays on your mind for the rest of the week.

Your parents think it started when you are fifteen. That’s when you start skipping school. It’s usually the same simple things that makes you skip class. You wake up feeling stressed or upset in the morning. You don’t want to go to school. You want to stay in bed and sleep for days. Maybe not wake up ever again. You go anyway, because if you don’t there’ll be questions. You don’t go to class, however, and after about twenty minutes of waiting in the hallway you go to the reception and claim you are sick. You say you are going home but you don’t. Going home would mean explaining to your mother why you’re there and getting sent straight back to school. She knows you too well to see that you aren’t sick. You don’t want to go back to school, so instead you cycle around until one o’clock, when you know your mother will have left for work. It is tiring and boring and you’re on edge the entire time because you might run into someone who knows you, but it’s better than the anxieties that come with school. The next day, your mind feels a little better and you would go to school again if it wasn’t for the fact that you didn’t go the day before. A normal day of school you can face, but you’ve missed a day which means talking to every teacher about making up the work you’ve missed. Never mind the fact that you haven’t done any homework at all and you will have to account for that. So, you tell your mom some classes have been cancelled and you stay home. You manage it again on the third day, because you always have a few free periods on Wednesday mornings and your mother knows that, so she doesn’t question you. The fourth day you go back to school. You don’t have any overly stressful classes on Thursday so you think you can manage again. The teachers are incredibly understanding because you’ve been ‘sick’ for three days, so you can take it a little easier and you feel good about going to school again. It’s only a matter of time before things get harder again, though. And since you didn’t get caught, you do the same thing again.

It’s not until a couple of months have passed that you do get caught. You’ve skipped three days the same way as before at least six more times. The teachers get more and more suspicious each time, but it’s only when you push your luck by doing it two weeks in a row that they realise what is going on. You only get punished for the last week though. You suppose that’s because they don’t have proof that you were actually skipping those other weeks. And you must be really lucky, because they give you two hours of detention for every hour you’ve skipped, instead of the usual one hour of detention and one hour of helping the janitor. You have no idea why they think helping the janitor wouldn’t be effective for you because the one time you had to do it, you absolutely hated it, but you decide not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The detentions aren’t really a punishment for you. You just spend every hour that was previously labelled a free period doing the exact same thing as you did before, sitting quietly and reading, except now they call it detention. The real punishment comes in the form of being dragged to talk about your feelings to several different people, all with your parents present. The first person you talk to is your mentor at school, who listens to your entire story, only to decide to send you to the counsellor. You go through the whole thing again with the counsellor, who also decides that she can’t really help and sends you off to the GP instead, saying that he will be able to refer you to a specialist who can help. She adds that once you have a diagnosis, she’ll be able to help as well. You doubt it, considering she can’t even tell what’s wrong with you. You go through it all for the third time, this time with the GP. You are on the edge of a depression, the GP says, and he refers you to a mental health specialist. A voice in the back of your mind says that since the doctor doesn’t know a lot of things that you deliberately held back (like the fact that you sometimes cut yourself, always the same spot on the back of your hand, with the excuse that it was just a cat scratch that you kept picking the scabs off), his diagnosis likely isn’t correct and that you’re probably in the middle of a depression and not on the edge of it, but you ignore it. The doctor didn’t diagnose you with depression, so you aren’t depressed. The whole depression thing gets forgotten anyway when you talk to the mental health specialist and get diagnosed with autism. The school latches onto that. Maybe they think the near depression was caused by the inability to function properly because of the autism, or maybe they just don’t know what to do about the depression, but have helped kids with autism before. You don’t know. And you don’t care. You don’t really care about anything anymore.

The autism diagnosis makes you recall something though. Your best friend once held a presentation about autism at school, when she was in seventh grade and you were in eighth. You’d known she was autistic as long as she had, since she got diagnosed when she was seven, but you hadn’t really known anything about it until the presentation. After the presentation you started to wonder. A lot of what she had explained about autism could also apply to you. Did you have autism? You dismissed the thought instantly. You didn’t have autism, you were just average. There isn’t anything different or special about you, you just wanted to be more like your best (and only) friend, who was awesome and you could only hope to be like her.

This little memory is part of what makes it difficult for you to pinpoint when exactly your depression started. It is obvious that little ten-year-old you already had problems, but when did those problems actually morph into depression? Was it when your parents divorced when you were twelve? You were completely unable to cope with living in two houses, swapping around every week. It got so bad that you couldn’t keep track of when anything was. School was fine because you always cycled there together with your sister, but you ended up quitting both scouting and korfball that year, leaving you with no extracurriculars. Or was it when you were fourteen, when your grades finally started slipping after not needing to study at all for your entire life? You managed to scrape by and pass third year, but only barely. You don’t pass fourth year, but that’s the year you started skipping, and you’re sure it started before that already.

Maybe it doesn’t matter when it started. All you know is that it did. And after that is revealed to you, it gets better. It is difficult, and you are held back, not only in fourth year, but also in fifth year, but it slowly gets better. You make friends with the people in the silent room, where you are allowed to spend your breaktime after you get diagnosed with autism. You get help with planning your schoolwork, which doesn’t really help all that much, because you suck at sticking to your planning, but you have to account for what you have and haven’t done so you run out of excuses not to do it. You slowly learn to interact with your peers, and not just be that quiet person sitting all alone all the time. You take a chance and say yes when a new friend asks you to come to her choir with her. You expect just to go once and decide it’s not for you, but you love it. You feel so happy at the end of it and after three rehearsals you join officially. You feel like an actual living person again and when you are twenty you start university with a good heart. And then it all goes to shit again.

You don’t even manage a month before things go downhill again. You are feeling great and when you are in your hometown you decide to visit your old high school. Most of your friends are younger than you and still go there and you want to say hi. When you get to the silent room only your newest friend, Esme, is there. You met her nine months earlier on Purple Friday when you both won a cake for being dressed the most purple. Within fifteen minutes she’d asked you whether you liked singing, and if you wanted to come to choir with her. You are forever grateful for that. You can tell she is upset the second you walk into the room. She tries to keep it together but breaks down not even ten minutes later. You learn that her grandma has kicked her out, leaving her to live in a group youth home. She is also bullied badly in her class and wants to transfer to another class, but doesn’t dare to ask for it. You wouldn’t dare to either if it were you, but you can’t stand to see her this way and drag her to the vice principal to make it happen. For over half an hour, you argue Esme’s case for her, both with the vice principal and the counsellor, because she is too upset to do it herself. There is no definite result, but it seems hopeful. You go home. You are exhausted. You can barely keep it together until the evening when you use your last energy to cry yourself to sleep.

Your hope is in vain. Esme gets transferred to the other class eventually, but it is useless. The people in her old class still go out of their way to get to her and her home situation sucks. She gets dragged along with her housemates into dangerous situations. Her grandmother pushes her to reconnect with her abusive mother. She starts drinking and smoking. There are multiple occasions where you decide to take her home with you, because she refuses to go back to the youth home; you know if you don’t, she will sleep out on the street, because she has done it before. She shows up to choir one time completely freaked out. She’s taken more XTC than she had ever before taken in one go and it feels different. Before this you didn’t even know that she started doing drugs. You tell the choir director, who asks a choir member who has experience with drugs to help you. You get through the rehearsal with difficulty, fighting to keep Esme in check and keep her from drinking too much water. When the rehearsal ends and the drug starts to work its way out, you think it will be okay, but then Esme locks herself into the bathroom and comes out all loopy, saying that she popped another pill. You call your father to come pick the both of you up and stay awake until four in the morning to keep her from doing anything stupid.

Over time Esme slowly seems to turn into a ghost, and as she does, so do you. Everyone who knows of the issues tells you to not let it affect you so much. That there is nothing you can do and that it is not up to you to do something. But you can’t let it go. You feel like you have to do something, and when you can’t do anything because there is nothing that can be done, you feel guilty for doing nothing. You are constantly afraid that you are going to get a call that she has killed herself. When she doesn’t show up for rehearsal, you fear that when you cycle home you are going to find her dead body in a ditch somewhere. You are scared that she will try to kill herself, and this time without giving a heads up, so that she can’t be stopped before she does anything like the last two times. You have nightmares about it all the time. You fail two classes because of too many absences. Some weeks choir is the only thing you actually get out of the house for. You don’t take care of yourself. You don’t shower for at least a month, but you can’t be sure exactly how long because all days just blur together. You don’t stop trying to help Esme though, and eventually your efforts pay off. The police search the youth home and find drugs in every room, but you convince Esme to rat out her drug-dealing housemates and get help. She does and within a week she is off to rehab. You start seeing the student psychologist. You actually made the appointment much earlier, but this is the earliest time possible. It helps a little. You talk through your feelings about everything that happened and feel a little better.

When you start coming back to yourself, you finally accept it: you are depressed. And since you feel similarly to how you felt years ago when you started skipping school, that must mean that you were depressed then too, no matter how much you denied it then because you had no diagnosis. It helps, deciding this about yourself. It makes it easier to accept your feelings. You feel this way because you are depressed, not because you are a piece of shit. You stay in bed because you are depressed, not because you are lazy. It makes it easier to try to do better too. Because you have a reason for not doing things well, you don’t need to improve everything in one go. You used to think that if you missed one class there would be no reason to go to the others because you were a piece of shit who couldn’t do anything right. Now you know that missing one class is better than missing them all, because you still manage to be strong enough to go to some classes, and that is a good thing.

Once again things get better. And once again things get worse. Esme runs away from rehab three times and the last time she is missing for two months. Your grandpa dies. One of your friends has a brain tumour and won’t be in class for at least a few months while they recover. But it’s not as bad anymore. You are better at accepting your feelings as valid. You have friends who support you and you have learned to accept that support. While it was hard to see that they genuinely care, especially since you only had one friend growing up and she had her own issues, you now know that they do and that they won’t desert you if you break down and need their help picking up the pieces. Yes, you still have issues and you will be kind of messed up for a while. Yes, it still hurts and you still don’t like to talk about it. But if you do want to, you know your friends are there for you. And for that same reason, you won’t turn away from Esme, or any other friend who needs help. Because you know how valuable and important that help and support can be. You probably wouldn’t be here without it.