My Friendly Face Hid Depression and Suicidal Ideation
CW: suicidal ideation and self-harm.
There’s something about my face.
At least, that’s what people have told me…including my own mother, who bore a similar visage and elicited similar responses from others. Since early childhood, people have always confided in me about things they felt they could not tell others. This includes friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. While my introvert heart might wish for a bit of personal space, my outward countenance appears to encourage people to tell me their life stories in detail. Perhaps it’s the big doe eyes, the rounded nose, or the mouth that slips easily into a smile—whatever it is, many have told me that I exude a warm and inviting aura.
This is why it may surprise many people to learn that, for most of my adolescence and well into my young adulthood, I suffered from dysthymia, sometimes known as “persistent depressive disorder.” Like many who suffer with this condition, I was functional to the outside world. I got good grades. I was involved in numerous extracurricular activities. I was a good Christian girl with little experience in the partying ways of my peers. Yet the battle to keep going, to overcome the steady stream of self-defeating thoughts, to keep at bay the alluring beacon of suicidal ideation, was a daily struggle.
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My symptoms, in retrospect, were not what everyone associates with depression. In fact, even though I was diagnosed in high school, I didn’t even consider many of my behaviors indications of depression at all. I knew that something was “off,” but I thought that something was wrong with me. Looking back, my sleep habits were an obvious sign that I was struggling, but I attributed it to my own laziness. I found myself constantly fatigued during the day, especially during college, when I would nap nearly every day and often struggled to stay awake in class. Conversely, I stayed up way too late nearly every night. I was rarely partying or enjoying any of the normal nocturnal activities one enjoys during those years, but spending time alone, watching TV, surfing the Net (as we called it back then), reading, and trying to enjoy the few hours of the day when I felt free to be myself outside of others’ expectations.
My relationship with food was similarly chaotic. Throughout high school and college, food was a source of comfort, the only conventional “bad habit” that I really allowed myself. I hardly ever drank alcohol and never used illegal drugs, but I was addicted to midnight mac and cheese. I was trying to “save myself for marriage,” and food became an important means of sublimating my sexual desires.
Not only did I eat to forget about my frustrated and often nonexistent love life, but the extra pounds also aided the invisibility and disembodiment that I clung to as a Christian trying to avoid any kind of sexual temptation. I fed into the fatphobic attitudes of the day as a means of keeping myself “pure.” I wore baggy clothes, let my naturally thick, wavy hair grow wild and free, and eschewed makeup. I cultivated a status as the funny friend, the wacky sidekick, the girl with lots of guy friends but rarely an actual boyfriend, reasoning that I couldn’t have premarital sex if no one was interested in having sex with me! This is not to say, of course, that there is anything wrong with bucking problematic conventions and having pride in one’s own body, but I was so blinded by purity culture and its attendant low self-esteem that I didn’t even really know my body, let alone what it truly wanted.
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In college, I found another way to separate myself from my bodily desires: self-harm. I may have been funny and functional in public, but I nearly always wore long sleeves to hide the fact that I sliced my arms with a razor blade on a regular basis. In my dysthymic state of mind, I found cutting to be a kind of relief, a way to keep it together on the outside and still have some sort of release for my own self-hatred. I knew that suicide was supposed to be a sin, but no one had ever told me that it was against God’s word to just cut oneself lightly, without the threat of mortal danger. I didn’t even know that it was a thing one could do until I met a girl in my dorm who showed me her razor blades. In a bizarre way, it felt almost empowering, having a physical release for the emotional pain, a way to keep my recalcitrant body in its place, punishing it for the fleshly desires that threatened my status as a righteous Christian and a pillar of femininity.
Another factor in my depression that I now recognize was something that, at the time, seemed like the polar opposite of depression: my anxiety. If anything, my outward attitude was not one of somber depression, but one of nervous energy. I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in high school, and looking back, I exhibited symptoms of this soul-sucking condition long before that. To this day, there persists a stereotype that OCD is an unseen force that afflicts people with a natural affinity for neatness and order, perhaps even a preternatural desire to alphabetize their bookshelves or to organize their sock drawer by color. But I can only wish that my OCD had helped me to do anything as productive as organizing my sock drawer.
Instead, my intrusive thoughts threatened to derail my entire life as I struggled with the constant worry of “What if?” that refused to release itself from my brain. My particular brand of OCD was focused not only on contamination, which led me to wash my hands until they bled, but also scrupulosity, a persistent fear of sin that threatened my brain with the fear of both hell and earthly punishment from God (such as the death of a family member) for the slightest transgression. Sometimes these two strains combined, like at the times when they conspired to convince me that I would die of AIDS from making out with my boyfriend. Looking back, it’s no wonder I became the funny friend because there was really no other way for me to enjoy myself at parties.
It’s hard for me to look back at those days, now that I have come so far. My own healing was a long process that involved not only therapy and medication but also letting go of the idea that my main goal in life was to please others. There was a time when I would have seen the life I have now, a life of pursuing my own goals and trusting myself as a moral guide, as inherently selfish. But these days, especially now that I have a daughter on the verge of adolescence herself, it is more important than ever for me to be comfortable in my own skin, so that she knows that she can and should always be comfortable in hers.
My own face may have more wrinkles and loose skin than it used to, but people still tell me their personal stories all the time. And I have more time and energy for them, now that my face is a true expression of my inner light and not just a cover for the persistent darkness.
Rachael Price teaches English at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. Her work has appeared in The Middle West Review, MidAmerica, The North Carolina Literary Review, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Transitions Abroad, and elsewhere. She spends a good portion of her free time thinking of ways to have less free time.