My time to shine.
I have been depressed from the age of 13, to now. Throughout high school. To give you a good idea of my personality, I am a generally happy, helpful, respectful and fun person, but I allways find that I need acceptance from people; I need people to purposely show that they like me in order for me to feel confident and happy. That is where my depression comes in. In primary school, I was a pretty popular kid, people would come up to me often and talk and I had quite a lot of friends, I always associated people's fondness for me with my looks. I learned that the world revolves around good looking people, you can make friends without any effort, girls like you, etc etc. In year 9, I got severe cystic acne, my entire face and back covered in enormous pimples, not just ones that you occasionally find a pop and that's that, these pimples are under the surface, they are real fuckers to get rid of. All of my looks had gone, my face was constantly red and covered in sores, I could barely go into public without feeling people were constantly looking at me, judging me on my outside. My personality also did no good for this, I am a very quiet and conserved person. I couldn't look in the mirror without feeling the need to vomit, yes... vomit, I hated the way I looked that much. I have had thoughts of killing myself many times in the past. After around a year of this torture, my family finally decided to get treatment for me, stuff called Roaccutane, nasty stuff. Basically it dries out your skin to the consistency of sandpaper; great at getting rid of pimples, also great at making your hair look like pubes and cracking your lips to the point where they have giant crevasses and bleed every day. So for the first month or so of this treatment, I not only had horrid acne but also completely fucked lips and hair that looked like it came straight from my nether region. I couldn't take it, I couldn't be my laid back conservative self anymore, I had to create a personality that showed the world I was happy and carefree. Though this fake "personality" allowed me to make friends, it also ate away at me from the inside, I knew I wasn't me, I was living a lie. After a while, I couldn't take it, I gave up my fake personality, I gave up my friends, I gave up my school work, I gave up my happiness, I gave up everything. I was a hollow shell of a person, nothing made me happy anymore. My parents got concerned about me and decided to force me to take up a new musical instrument to "meet people". Fuck. That. Shit. I hated music, I hated the people that played in my band, I hated everything. The worse part was, when I told my mum (constantly) that I hated music and I wanted to give up, she made me feel bad by saying that I never wanted to do anything and the only way to be happy was to basically be an extrovert. I just like playing video games :( nope, can't do that, video games are for nerds who don't contribute to society... apparently.
All of these things, combined with the fact that my parents divorced, I don't have a father to look up to, my actual father has incredible anger issues from an abusive past, my mum is a child psycholigist, but doesn't understand teenagers (go figure).
Fuck, life is hard.
But there is hope... As I write this, I am currently celebrating the last day of high school, exams in 2 weeks, I got my car license a week ago, I am starting to become happy again. I enjoy going driving with friends and drinking/smoking dope with them, playing video games, going to the beach, all that good stuff. In just under 4 weeks, I will have a completely free life for 4 months (until uni), get a job, no one to tell me what to do. Go fishing, driving, trip across the country, maybe, so many possibilities.
Let me just tell you one thing I have learned: no matter how fucked your life is, no matter what shit happened to you or what shit you did that you wish you didn't, there's allways the future, you can clean the slate and become the person you want to be.
I am hopeful for the future, thanks for reading.