Teen Depression: Find Your Tools

The post below was written by my middle daughter. She is a fifteen. She wrote this for a high school class. I'm sharing it in my blog with her permission. She read it to me after she had written it and asked if she should share it with the class or write something else. I told her she should definitely turn it in. Depression and mental health is an extremely important topic and one that, especially among teens, does not get enough attention.

I am more proud than words can express when I see all the struggles that my baby has dealt with and the courage it took for her to keep struggling and find her way through.

She's got a bigger tool box at fifteen than I had at forty!

Find Your Tools

Dark shades of gray, and bleak, dull, green were everywhere I looked. Numbness existed in every part of my body, and a dazed and somewhat detached sense lay in my brain. There was a lack of emotions, neither positive nor negative, regardless of the events occurring around me. What am I doing? Where am I going? Questions about my existence and what point it could possibly have came and went, and with them the pull to continue living. Feeling this way- well, more like practically not feeling anything at all- for the rest of my life seemed pointlessly tedious.

I lived with the dull pain and the absence of excitement for life for what felt like centuries. Nothing anybody said would ever make it better. The same advice flooded into my ears until it felt like the words, “it’s going to be okay,” were flowing through my veins. These words were intended to give me hope, but they continually left me laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling forlorn and beyond recall. I wouldn’t say ‘sad’ is an accurate description of these sensations. With sadness comes tears, but with this sentiment I was unceasingly experiencing, tears never came. Instead, everything was drearily monotonous, as if I was watching my life through a dull filter, in which the colors consisted only of bleak shades of gray and green.

There was a point in time where I was confident, almost completely sure, that I wouldn’t be here by the day of my intended high school graduation. This thought seemed inevitable, and that scared me. I wanted to change how I felt, so I made a few seemingly small modifications in my life. I began writing out everything that I was feeling, or not feeling. I wrote all of the details about that day’s numbness and uncertainties that made me question why I was still alive. I never limited the amount I wrote. Some days the words flowed through four, maybe five pages. Other days I wrote three sentences and felt as though I had nothing else to say.

However, regardless of the amount I wrote, at the end of each daily entry I would write three things that I was thankful for. Three things that made me smile or simply made me appreciate being here, alive and breathing. I found the little things that I enjoyed, even if they meant absolutely nothing. Watching candles burn, listening to the sound of wilderness at night, looking at the passing cars, observing ants as they traveled across a concrete sidewalk, waking up to watch the sunrise every morning. Small things that had no real meaning yet things I realized made me appreciate the world around me.

I did all of those things and hundreds more to distract my mind from the numbness and the constant dull pain. Creating art of all mediums, singing songs of all genres, dancing freely to music with all sorts of sounds. I continued to add onto the list of simple things I could do to make me feel alive. I call this imaginary list ‘my tools’. I attempted to steadily increase the amount of tools that I had found. I expanded my toolbox by finding new small aspects of life to enjoy and appreciate about the world around me.

I refer to depression sometimes as a cloud. Some days the cloud is wispy and thin, the sun is shining through, and life doesn’t seem quite so impossible. Other days it’s as if the cloud is tremendously heavy, dense, and dark and won’t go away no matter how much you try to see the sun rays hidden behind it. On those days, life seemed absolutely insurmountable. It’s also on those days when I would contemplate what the results would be on the people around me if I were gone. When these difficult, dark-cloud days would happen, instead of sitting in silence and and staring off in a sort of numbed daze, I began to go outside. I would go and listen to the bugs and the birds and the blowing of the wind, and I’d try to let the wind blow that dark, enveloping cloud of numbness away too.

Using all of these newly discovered ‘tools’ enough created a habit. It became second nature to go outside and watch the trees sway in the cool breeze of a beautiful fall day. It became ordinary to find me sitting by a creek listening to the rush of the water. Colors began appearing again, quite possibly more vibrant than before. The beauty in life had surfaced in my eyes once again. Now, I can say that I have found my passion, and it makes sense why I push through all the dark-cloud days. Although nothing is set in stone and I sometimes still feel like I have a million dark-cloud days a week, I can envision myself in a happy place somewhere in the future. I think- no, I know- that with my toolbox by my side and my “three things a day,” I can make it. I know you can too.

Look for those tools.