Diaries of a Depressed Teenager

Diaries of a Depressed Teenager. Table of Contents Let’s Start with Why? Time Straight facts R.I.P. Mr. Wallace How I Raised Myself What a Pity First Rant of the Day Blood or Water September Eleventh I think this is Love American Pride “I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast” Pressure What’s an Adult Self-Discovery at its Finest New Bliss Worldly Wisdom Stay Gold Half a Girl The Girl with Red Hair Real Love The Tragedy of Macbeth Not a Chameleon Lying is Easy My Mom Dear Pastor Blank, Only a little Sorry … “Drug Policy as Social Control” … The Superhero Myth “A Women’s Beauty?” The Power of Sex New Year’s Eve Every Single Time “The Allegory of the Cave” Food Fights Back Dramatic Irony Every Man for Himself We’re Doomed Education Evolution “Listen to the Kids” My Time Capsule Mia’s Truth Unconventionally the Damn Same Now the Who? What? When? Bibliography Dedication I’d like to dedicate this book to my family. Not just because I used them so freely in my writing, but because I truly don’t know where I’d be without them. let's Start with Why? It was sometime in the eighth grade that I saw my very first therapist and even though that was our first and last appointment together, she gave me “homework” that turned into an outlet I carried throughout my young life. She told me I should start writing down everything I was feeling or thinking on a daily basis, in a journal where I could be 100% honest and be able to reflect of some things I may not have even known about myself. Daily was a stretch, but in time I did start writing somewhat regularly in my free time. Maybe this goes without saying, but I’ve learned a lot. What I didn’t expect is that it wasn’t all about myself. See the thing I learned about myself was that I undoubtedly have depression and anxiety. I also learned I undoubtedly have attention deficient disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, but those are separate issues. What I learned about my depression was that it all seemed very internal, even when it wasn’t. I had gotten too comfortable in my own head and it made it more and more difficult for me to get out, especially when I really needed to. Everything I dealt with seemed like it was all coming from me, directed at me, and never going to leave me. It was like how a shy person reacts around new people. The more people there are, the quieter they get. The more I needed to be free of myself, the more lost I would get. I never felt more isolated than when I was in my darkest places. Those were the times I was the most lost and something kept holding me back, like the little girl from Insidious in that weird black hole thing. What I’m saying is: writing everything down made me realize that some of my problems had a lot to do with how I interacted with the entire rest of the world and vise versa and that was a discovery that changed a lot for me. I learned that I couldn’t change every last thing about myself and even though it drove me crazy, that was okay because at the very least I could change how it affected me and in turn, how I could choose to use it. I learned to get out of myself more often in situations I otherwise would’ve never enjoyed and when they didn’t I learned to utilize that time as the time to be internal. In these times, I would write. So for the next five years, I wrote. I wrote at all hours of the day and night, to all different types of music from Carrie Underwood to Drake, I wrote while I traveled and while I cried, in all different places like my room or Time Square, I wrote until I literally couldn’t anymore because of how numb my hand was. I would write everything, no matter how stupid or insignificant it seemed at the time because after a while, I realized nothing that randomly popped into my head was insignificant. I would write for myself, for my school assignments and sometimes what I wrote for myself would later become my assignments. I wrote like my life depended on it because at some points I know it did. With that, five years later I wrote until I had a crazy idea. An idea to take every last thing I’d written down all these years and use it for something I knew I could. I knew that if I did absolutely nothing else of importance in my life, I would send a message to every last person in the world who felt ever felt like me, even for a second and if I could, I would save lives. I know that may sound dramatic, but it was really all I thought of every time I tried to talk myself out of it, which I did a lot. It was an idea I threw around in my head for awhile before I finally decided to act on it and after that, there was just no turning back. I had set my mind on something and I was doing it for reasons I was very clear on. I know I’m not perfect. To this day, I carry my demons and I don’t have all the answers, but sometimes I found comfort in people who could listen and really understand what I was saying and feeling. That’s what I thought of every time I felt like quitting. So why did I decide to write an entire book of the most depressing things a person can possible think of? I could come up with a million beautifully fluffy reasons about why I started writing this that would sound much better than the actual truth, but I’m a hopelessly honest person so the honest answer is, I didn’t. The truth is this literally started as a diary and nothing more. The deed was pretty much done, but I still had to double and triple check on a pretty much regular basis that this decision was absolutely what I wanted and not something I would live to regret. The answer was never the same. Sometimes I was sure beyond any doubt that this was the right decision and other times I wondered if what I’d started should stay as it started: personal. I also wondered if maybe I was being too honest at times and if that would later come back to bite me in the ass. I frequently had to reread entries and decide if it was better to omit them or edit them to sound less harsh or brutal. In the early stages a lot was omitted and a lot was altered. Later on, I decided to include everything exactly as it was and I mean everything. By the end, nothing was left untold or ignored and absolutely nothing was filtered. If I was going to share something I was going to share it exactly how I thought it, without any restrictions. That’s ultimately how I came to the decision to publish my diary anonymously. I had to be at least somewhat conscious of other people’s feelings and privacy. I found it gave me so much more freedom in my decision-making when I didn’t have to worry about who I mentioned or possibly offended. I could literally say anything, which is usually what I’d do in my day-to-day life anyway. Everything became more authentic and personal to me and I imagined it would do the same for whoever would read these thoughts and not have me to interpret them (which could sometimes be necessary.) As hard as it may be to believe, never in all the time I spent slaving away over pieces of paper writing my deepest, craziest thoughts did I ever think anyone but me would ever see this stuff. As a matter of fact, for a while the idea of anyone else reading any of it literally petrified me. Every thing you read in this book is something I wrote at any random moment in my life that I had something to get off my chest. It’s all my truest, deepest, 100% authentic thoughts. This is my diary and only now did it also become yours. Time 3/21/12 Time is something I, like most people, complain to never have and yet when we find ourselves with nothing to do, do nothing with it. Here I find myself looking out into space wondering what to do with the next two hours of my Friday detention. Then that thought pulls me to think of all the things I always say I would do more if I had the time. Workout? Not here