Hi, my name is Deneille and I am 19 years old. I have decided to submit this article for my own peace of mind more than anything. I suffer from anxiety depression and am also very paranoid. It takes a huge toll on my life and has changed me from the person I was into the person I am.
I guess everything first started when I was very young. Was told from people that I had put up on a pedestal that I was fat, and would never amount to anything. Even though in reality I was never an overweight person. This started when I was about 8 years old. A vulnerable 8 year old child still learning about the world and where they fit in.
This continued all through my adolescence, constantly being mocked and ridiculed to a point of self confidence so low that I believed every word that these "heartless" people were telling me. I was always paranoid that people would think I was fat because I had come to expect that is what every single person thought when they were forced to look at me.
Everything hit rock bottom when I was about 14. At 14, it seems that everything around you is a major ordeal, not just for me, but for anyone going through puberty. I was under constant stress about what people thought of me and never wanted to go out with my friends cause I hated getting seen. My friends would get so frustrated with me cause they didn't understand. And because they didn't understand they would make comments that hurt more than anything. Comments like "Just snap the f*** out of it Deneille, geez what is your problem?" I would say nothing but go home and cry till I fell asleep. I thought I knew what my problem was...living.
I thought about suicide a lot during those years and would amuse myself by thinking of death and ways that I could achieve it. I kept a journal which I wrote in religiously every night and wrote down these thoughts and ideas. All was fine until my mum found it and read an excerpt from it. That was enough for her to get on my case about going to see someone. There was no way I was going to counseling. I did not want to be branded a psycho, because I wasn't I was just sick to death of being me. I confronted mum about it and I simply said "You can choose your relatives but you cant change who you are."
Years past, four to be exact, with me continually beating myself up about the stupidest of things and taking every single bit of criticism anyone ever gave me to heart and thinking I was a worthless waste of human existence. I could never take a compliment and would not know how to except it because I did not want to except that I was good at something.
My condition worsened around the age of 18. I had never been an anxious type of person but now, it seemed that I spent all day being anxious and frustrated with myself and crying myself to sleep every night. I never went out with my friends just stayed at home and thought that I would be a menace to society if I walked out the door. I hated getting the mail, because I felt so exposed to the world. I would cautiously peer out the window to see if any cars were coming or anyone was walking by and then run out and back. One time I remember I thought the coast was clear and I hurried out and couldn't get the mail out of the box, it was caught on something. There was a person approaching me and I looked up and saw them and had this huge panic attack. I was a sweating, shaking mess. These voices were screaming at me to get the hell back inside but I wanted to get the mail so I was torn between two directions and so I ran back inside as fast as I could and locked the door and ran to my room and locked that door and there I stayed for hours. I knew something was wrong from that day onwards.
People started to notice the change in me. I was withdrawn and never happy and always losing my temper at an alarming rate.
One night that made my decision to see someone was one I will never forget. My house mate was on the phone and I needed to use it, any normal person would wait and pass time by doing something else. But no, not me I went to the kitchen and when something didn't go right I hurled the cutting board across the room and screamed at the top of my lungs "F***!!!!! What the F***is wrong with me!!!!" and I crawled over to the corner of the kitchen and cried so loud and rocked myself and blocked myself out of existence for about half an hour. My house mate's 3 year old was crying as well because she hates to see people upset.
My house mate called my mum and she came around and got me off the floor and settled me down, and she made me promise that I would go and see someone to try and sort myself out.
I was so ashamed of the person I had become. I branded myself "'Lil miss psycho" and couldn't stand the sight of myself. I went and saw someone and they immediately put me on antidepressants. Auorix, they did not do a single thing to me except prevent me from sleeping. Next try, my psychiatrist put me on Cipromil, which also did nothing but deprive me of sleep and I could not bring myself to eat, because of the overwhelming nausea that it caused. So I got changed once again onto Zoloft 100mg. Still I found myself exerting my old behavior and so he put me on 200mgs of Zoloft a day. Thsi was all in a space of 4 months.
To this day I am still on that dose of Zoloft and I get so paranoid when people ask me what medication I am on, I am still ashamed of the person I have become. but I am beginning to see ways of bettering my outlook on life, even though I am still very anxious and paranoid. But they too have changed for the better, I no longer get so anxious that I dig holes in my palms with my fingernails and I am not so paranoid that I cant actually go out and check the mail. But the feelings are still there and I try my hardest to fight them.
One thing I can say that has helped me begin to overcome my illness is my writing. I express myself and my moods through writing and I feel a sense of satisfaction after I write. I have written short story's since I was 8 (a coincidence??) and poetry from 14 (another coinsidence??) and at the age of 18 (yet another coincidence??) I started to write my own novel, which I am still currently working on. It seems strange that at the most traumatic times in my life I have reached for the pen to overcome my sadness and to escape reality.
These days though, things are much better, although I still feel alone. Some days I am so overcome with loneliness I am unable to know what to do with myself. Feeling that I am destined to live the life of the lonely and will never find happiness. Sometimes I think that I don't deserve it.
Deneille6@aol.com
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