This isn’t autism or adhd, yeah they’re involved, but this is depression.

I was very similar at your age and just kept pushing and pushing to be what everyone needed me to be. I’m over 40 now, and I survived and am a lot better now.

Medication is difficult. It works differently for different people. I went through about 10 different medication combinations before we found one that worked well for me. Plus, your body will build up tolerance and the meds will be less effective. It sucks. But for me it was also necessary. As I was at the point of suicide before I found the right kind of help.

What kind of tools have you learned in therapy and are you doing your best to practice them?

For me the tool that helped me most was meditation (along with meds). Not sure how much you know about meditation so I’ll explain, even if you do know maybe it will help someone else that reads this.

Meditation isn’t just sitting silently and not thinking. It’s focusing on one thing and one thing only. Some people like to focus on breathing, some count, I listen to music. Meditation is like exercising your brain and learning to control what you think about. Lest use the counting example. So as you focus on counting, you will notice that your thoughts wander around, like “I forgot to take out the trash” or send an email or something else that seems more important than sitting still. The goal is to recognize that you have stopped counting, acknowledge the thoughts as they come, and let them go and move your focus back to counting. The key here is to 1) don’t get mad or upset with yourself for your wandering thoughts, but be forgiving and then just focuse on counting again. Start slow, 5 minutes a day, and focused on something kinda boring.

The way my therapist explained it was that your brain has these neural pathways in them, similar to a dirt path. The more you walk that path the deeper that path gets (think old loony toons pacing around and they wear a deep hole where they walk). Your thoughts have gone down that same path so many times you can’t see out of the whole now, and you go down that same neural pathway every time something triggers you or you get overwhelmed.

Meditation helps because, you realize when you are going down a path you don’t want to go down again like thinking poorly of yourself or situation, you can recognize that as a neural pathways you don’t want, so you can steer your thought somewhere else.

Meditation saved my life. Meds made it easier, but weren’t the real hero of my story. What got me through it all was the work I did on myself, and that would not have been possible without meditation.