Dep has been my frenemy for as long as I can remember. And like most relationships we have had times that we have grown apart, that I don't think about him on a regular basis but then there are times, like the past 6 months that we are inseparable. It's times like these that our relationship is a destructive one.
We first became really close in my mid to late teens. Dep was always there to put me down, to make me see all the negatives in life, to make me think I was going crazy. He would make me cry constantly, make me fight and push away loved ones and during this time I wasn't mature enough to deal with what Dep was doing to me. I would talk to people about him, doctors would prescribe me with pills to get rid of him and I would struggle to understand him and the effect he had on my life. There was no reason why he was there, no matter how much I talked or how much I wracked my brain I could never work out why he stuck around. It eventually got to the point where I became good at hiding him even though I knew he was around my neck choking me. I also got good at ignoring him and telling myself he wasn't there. And it worked... for a long time he was always in the background, always keeping to himself... waiting...
Two years ago, Dep constructed a drawn out plan to reenter my life and this time he had one goal: to destroy me. He started with kicking me in my self confidence when I was rejected from an already lined up job then he moved on to making me feel horrid about where my life was going forcing me to change my plans twice, three times. Once my self confidence was destroyed, he started on my heart.
With each heartbreak, he took a piece of me, stripping me down, making it hard for me to catch my breath and the pain... the pain was worse with every piece. It was like he was taking part of my shield with every blow. Late last year, he took what I thought was the final piece I had and I fell into a heap. I couldn't breathe, eat, sleep. There was a time my parents physically had to come to my house and lift me off my bedroom floor where I had been laying for hours screaming and crying until I was too exhausted to move.
Dep had broken me and I was left to pick up the pieces and put my mask back together. I had gotten so good at doing it over the years that I had even convinced myself that I was fine, I'd pushed my hurt aside and my mask was breathing again. That was when I met him... the guy who could have potentially been the love of my life.
I guess it was part of Dep's plan to give me a break for a while, just enough for me to fall in love, just enough for me to feel really happy, just enough so that I could be the type of person that I wanted to be, the type of person he fell in love with and we were in love... we were blissfully happy. For the first time in my dating life I felt like I was being loved for who I was, I didn't need to be anyone else with him. He challenged me in all the right ways and it took some getting used to but for the first time I had a partner in this life, someone to look forward to the future with, someone who I could actually see a future with. I mean, he wasn't perfect... I was realistic, I never put him on a pedestal but he may have just been perfect for me... and from very early on as hard as I tried to initially resist it, I knew he could possibly be my one.
I was upfront about Dep's existence quite early on in the relationship but it took the loss of a so called best friend for Dep to get the crowbar out and start plying away at the existing cracks. Just enough for my insecurities to show and just enough for my person to pull away from me and my demons. In the space of a few months, Dep had taken two important people from my life, people who weren't strong enough to stick around to deal with what he was doing to my life.
The end of my relationship was the nail in an already very well constructed coffin that Dep had built for me. He had pushed me to the point of unimaginable pain... pain that caused me to take painkillers, too many painkillers and I was admitted to hospital.
Believe it or not, this is where my story starts. Dep is a personification of my depression, my black dog and I write this not to get sympathy but to get an understanding from people and an awareness for an often invisible illness.
This blog will consist of my life with Dep, my therapies, my thoughts, my lists, my everything. If the last year since this story ends/starts has taught me anything, it's that I'm an open book now and if that can help other people then this horrible illness might mean something.
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