Originally published at BULLETPROOFsoul. You can comment here or there.

I have had depression recur on me so many times I can’t even begin to count. The fact is, I thought that I had rid myself of it forever because I was in such a great elevated state for months. Then I crashed, hard.

I remember myself as a teenager, going through the same cycles over and over. Once I would think I was out of the woods and okay again, getting things done, making lots of art and doing so many things that I enjoyed, only to get back to the point where I was on my knees begging God to kill me. So many nights I stared at the moon and cried, beating my head on the floor and my fists on my chest pleading for relief. All the while, I plotted and planned for the moment that I would take my own life. I thought I would give God ample time to do it himself. I always
thought my life was like that movie, The Butterfly Effect. When I saw that movie I was like “Oh my God, that’s my life”. All through my teens I was fighting to live or die, but whatever it was it had to be relief from my condition. Depression ravaged everything. I would put on the brave face for school and friends, but come home to a destroyed me. My room reflected my angst. I couldn’t see the clutter for the junk that filled my mind.

I will admit something here that I have rarely ever confessed: I had imaginary friends from the time I was 8 years old till my early twenties. I had what you all would understand as “A Beautiful Mind”. I had to beg the people that spent time with me to go away. They started popping up at the most inopportune moments, cajoling me. They wanted my attention. I still remember their names. These people were my comfort, the only things that would keep me going, whispering affirmations in my ear, holding me in the darkness, trying their best to life me from the shadows of my depression. They were still around when I would feel good and be productive. These apparitions, they didn’t leave me because my mood lifted. They rejoiced with me through my happiness.

When they started getting in the way of me looking sane…that’s when I told them they had to go. My paren
ts started to notice that I would be talking to people and they were asking me who. I would say “Just….” and look over to find that the person I was just talking to had gone. I never uttered a name to my parents. They never really knew that I wasn’t just talking to myself. At first, I thought they were shy and just hiding. But as time went on, I understood what they really were: figments of my tortured psyche. Even after I knew that, it was hard to get them to leave. They continued to come out and try to chat with me sporadically until after my first year of marriage.

I have always been able to overcome the things that others would not have been so lucky to conquer. I willed myself out of panic attacks and anxiety disorder. Those were diagnosed in my early teens. I willed myself to stop having nervous ticks like biting my nails and shaking my legs. I couldn’t stop my hair from falling out along that nerve line that just happens to run down the middle of my head, but that is something I may never control.

Anyway, that is just a glimpse of what I am talking about when I say I *know* there is more to this than meets the eye.