Hey, I’m Depressed

I don’t think I can point to a specific day or event when I realized "Hey, I’m depressed!" For me, there was no one triggering event; in my case it was more of a culmination of several bad situations and experiences coming to a head when I was about ten years old. As a young child, somewhere between age three and five, I experienced sexual abuse.

It was no coincidence that my first feelings of actual depression emerged at about age ten, when even bulky sweaters could not hide my early physical development. I began to really hate my body and feel so guilty for living inside of it. All of that sexual stuff I’d been exposed to when I was a little kid now took on new relevance and meaning.

School mornings became anxious times for me as I pictured the day ahead and me having to parade my tall, disgusting self through the hallways filled with small, flat-chested girls who noticed that I looked different and sometimes commented on our differences. I spent many school mornings having sharp, tight stomach pains and crying from the pain, and maybe even more from knowing that the knot in my stomach was not caused by something I had eaten or from a virus. I knew the pain and bad feelings were coming from an invisible, invading monster, which was bigger, and no match for me. This enemy also made me feel tired all of the time and sometimes unable to gather the energy to get out of bed. It also caused me to worry that if I went out in public, the monster would make me lose control and do awful things. I began to question whether or not I had actually done these things. I was filled with doubt and self-loathing.