the Darkness didn’t get me (this one is personal)
I wanted to end my life. I wanted so badly to end my life.
That was three years ago.
Today, I defended my Master’s degree. Today, I walked into that exam a different person that I was three years ago.
Three years ago, when I started my degree, I was severely depressed and my anxiety crippled me. I started my degree hoping that a new city and a new challenge would heal me, would show my brain that my life was amazing and I had no reason to be sad. I, of course, know that that’s not how it works. It was just a band-aid on an amputated limb. I couldn’t escape the pain, the emptiness inside me.
I was hospitalized soon after I began. I was there for a month.
A couple months later I went back to school.
But those first six months, although I picked myself up every day and went to work, I wasn’t really there. My mind was fuzzy. I was still empty. It took me hours to open my mouth and ask a question to my co-workers, to get past the anxiety I still had. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t remember details. I wasn’t the student I had always been. I still spent most nights in tears.
Finally, some confidence started to creep back into my mind. Not the kind of confidence that says I-have-a smoking-hot-body-and-everyone-should-want-to-be-me-because-I’m amazing. And while that of course is also totally true…. It was the kind of confidence one needs to not hate yourself anymore, to believe that your life is worth it, to believe that you actually want to keep on living.
Slowly but surely, in little steps followed by much smaller steps, I began to feel myself healing.
One day someone said to me, I’m glad you’re still here. I burst into tears because I could genuinely say that I was glad to still be here too.
I’m not all the way there yet, but I’m miles away from that first day three years ago.
I’ve written two novels since then. I’ve got a third halfway done. And a fourth is in its precious baby stages. I submitted my first short story. I got my first rejection. I beta read for the first time. I discovered reading lesfic, not just writing it.
I met the love of my life.
I conquered one of my greatest fears and I learned how to drive.
I gave an oral presentation at an international conference in front of two hundred people.
I got a tattoo.
If you were to tell the me three years ago, the one who wouldn’t say hello to her co-workers because she was so terrified, because she felt so worthless, that any of that was possible, I would have laughed in your face. When you’re in that dark place and people say it gets better, you want to believe them, but your mind can’t believe it. Logically you know it’s true. Logically you would tell your friends the exact same thing. But there’s no way the darkness will let you hold on to that hope.
But here I am. Whole. Healthy. Loved. Worthy. A writer. A scientist. A girlfriend. A daughter. A sister. A friend.
Completing my degree today wasn’t just for the three letters that will follow my name, it wasn’t just for my second degree, it was for one thing. Me. I made it. The darkness didn’t get me.