I spent part of today looking at www.facebook.com after a friend sent me an invite. It’s kind of fun and I’ve found a few people I’d pretty much lost contact with and hadn’t wanted to. Then I decided to log onto www.friendsreunited.com as I hadn’t even looked in quite a few years. I love the idea of it, to catch up with old friends from school, those people you spent so much time with and swore you would always stay in touch with.
Why it makes me sad I have no idea.
I do have some fond memories of school and the people I was closest to but the overall experience for me was not good. I don’t know if I was the cause or if just being me was enough for some people to hate me, but I don’t recall ever being nasty to someone just to make them feel bad.
I also suspect it’s in the last few years of school (so when I was about 14), when Dysthymia started to rear it’s ugly head and I was very up and down and confused. I know that’s a common thing for most kids going through the change from child to young adult but I felt very lost. Maybe it’s because my behaviour was so erratic, that I became a target for the bullies.
I wasn’t popular and to be honest I didn’t care, I had the friends I did, and I also liked to be alone, to read or just to think. By the end of my school experience, I just wanted to be left alone.
Maybe I feel sad in part, because I feel I haven’t achieved anything since leaving school. I’ve tried various careers but bouts of depression usually ended my attempts. Or that I couldn’t be that go-getting high flyer with bags of energy and enthusiasm that people seem to want these days.
I don’t use Dysthymia as my excuse for everything but it did take so long to get diagnosed and appropriate treatment going that really, it’s only in the last few years I’ve started to piece everything together and started to figure out who I am. I feel I lost the most important years that most young adults have to figure out where they are going in life, to depression.
That being said, I feel proud of who I am now. I’m a wife, I have a home that I love and a husband who is my world, and not trying to sound overly dramatic, I am alive. That one word means so much to people like me because it is has been a very hard struggle to get to the point where I even wanted to be. I don’t think everyone will understand that, but if you do, feel proud of yourself too, and never give up. You never know what is round the corner.
*hugs*
