I have been diagnosed with depression for as long as I can remember. For as long as I can remember, I considered myself broken. Nowadays logging on to social media and you can find everyone talking about depression, suicidal tendencies, etc, but growing up before the internet that kind of thing was not common at all. I feel alone and isolated and lonely now, even seeing other people’s posts about the same things I am going through, but when you don’t have that, when you are alone in your room stuck in your head with no outlet, the world seems like a much darker, lonelier place than it actually is.
Even though the feelings of isolation and loneliness is still there today, seeing others share their stories does help to know I am not alone, even if the irrational side of my brain has me believing that I am. So why am I sharing this now? Because I am tired of hiding who I am. I am tired of being ashamed of the demons that plague my head. I want to be a more open and honest person and I think that this is going to be how I do it.
People have told me things like “you shouldn’t share that” and for a while I might have thought well maybe they know something I don’t, maybe I should keep this stuff to myself. Seeing other people be so comfortable with sharing their own demons has me thinking that the people who didn’t want me to share is because it made them uncomfortable. Why?
Is it because their own demons have them so uncomfortable that they wish not to have others be so open about their own? Do they want you to just conform and ignore it? Was that their secret to life, just ignore the demons and go along pretending like everything is fine, but really any moment alone in their head eats them alive?
Maybe they have no irrational demons like me, maybe they are just “normal” people who don’t have the same headspace issues I do. It is entirely possible that their words, though said to me in passing 15 years ago still haunted me today. Is that normal? What is normal? Is normal just conforming to what everyone else is doing and losing your uniqueness along the way?
I don’t want to be normal, I never was normal. Recently I’ve been embracing the weirdness more and more. Outwardly becoming the weird person I’ve always suppressed in an attempt to pose as normal. I am tired of hiding. I am weird, I am depressed, I have demons, and I am a mess of a person. It is who I am.