After ten years of struggle, soul-searching through the catalogue of therapies and anti-depressants, you finally find something that works. For the first time in however long, you feel your symptoms alleviating, and slowly but surely you make your way towards something resembling "normal", the kind of level-headedness you've heard about but no longer remember.
The issue is, no-one prepares you for the feeling of being without.
When you tackle depression and anxiety from your preteens into adulthood, you suddenly find that you don't truly know how to cope with a brain that isn't constantly trying to implode at every turn. What do you fill your time with when, all of a sudden, you have the energy to do something other than lie in bed and despair? It's a rare topic of conversation for people with depression: how one tidies away the aftermath, the mess, the shards of yourself spilled on the floor, the shattered crockery.
Depression drives you to lose touch with yourself in so many ways. It spends its time unpicking the connection between brain and body, which is why depression so often comes with dissociation, with apathy. It dulls the senses and pulls you deep into the core of yourself so that everything external becomes a movie you're stuck watching despite finding the entire premise upsetting, and the material dull.
When I was fifteen, I attempted suicide. I remember so little from that time, except that I was truly sick of it already. Ten years on, it shocks me to think it could have all been over when it had truly barely begun. The weight of the world on my shoulders, the insurmountable feeling of doom that knelt on my chest and dug its fingers into my scalp. How I held on, then, through the next nine years unmedicated and untreated, I'll never truly know.
It's been almost six months now since I started on a medication which has effectively eliminated all of my symptoms. There's still the odd flare up — the joys of the incompatibility of mental illness and hormone cycles — but for the most part, I no longer struggle with depression. But in mastering that part of me, I've lost something fundamental about my life. I'm a spider, used to the daily drag of repairing a broken web over and over again, only to find that the intrusion no longer comes to pluck apart the threads. I feel "out of business", old news. I'm a mother whose children have families of their own, sitting to the dinner table with a cup of tea, the peace a burden on my mind rather than a relief.
I am, suddenly, unnecessary.
So, what can I do?
I'll throw myself wholeheartedly into my hobbies. No more countless hours lost to 'content', to ten second clips on my phone on repeat for hours at a time. This time, I'll be the one to create, though it's going to take a long time for that part of me to spring back.
I'll put myself out there, no longer afraid to be seen. I won't hide my face, my voice, by being. I'll be comfortable in my existence, in the way my shape takes up space in the world.
I'll spend the next ten years recouping all of that lost time, day by day.
For the first time, since fifteen, since the pills in the pocket, I can sit alone with myself on a grassy hill and feel the peace of being alive.
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