I'm New to This Pt. 1

I decided to use writing as a method of restoring myself, but honestly, I planned to whisper just enough to let off the steam and move the pain out of the queue. I have a lot of creative things I want to complete, and I know my feelings are in the way. But I planned to softly nudge it to the side. Scooch it a little. What I am learning, against my will, is that silence isn't an option this time. Deep down, I do not want to trickle, I want to flood.

My fear is drowning.

I have spent most of my life underwater and nothing scares me more than being submerged in sadness. It's dangerous. When I wrote about my life with depression years ago I discussed it through the understanding I had at the time. I thought I understood it well. But like I’ve said before, healing means going back and putting question marks where there were once exclamation points.

Now my entire life is punctuated by question marks, angry emojis and WTF GIFs. Initially, I couldn’t grasp why these revelations weren’t content with staying internal. Where was the need to be seen coming from? I know I am a Gemini Moon but dang! What I have settled on is, it is not about anyone understanding me enough to care about me, the thought of being pitied makes me physical ill. It's about people understanding me enough to leave me the fuck alone. I just want to be left alone.

This is why I have started being very direct with my warnings to people about my potential range of reactions. I am fatigued with going out of my way to make space for what they may have gone through and my needs being suffocated. I have been too considerate without demanding consideration. Again, not consideration for sympathy, but for recognition that my kindness, my cordiality, my tenderness… all choices. I need people to appreciate that I am going out of my way to present the way I do. Internally, I am always one breath away from Hulk Smashing everything in my path and lately I have felt like I am ready to exhale.

I am living for the first time, and it is not easy.

Shanica… aren’t we all?

Well yea, but also, no.

Trigger warning: If mental health struggles are a difficult subject for you, this isn’t the blog for you to read. I also may not be a person you need to know because we go hand in hand.

Looking back, I was depressed by 4th grade. That was a significant year of transition and instability. We moved and moved again and moved again. I was enrolled in 4 different schools that year, missing the infamous mission project at each school when I just knew I was going to get to recreate San Juan Capistrano. As early as 8, I just knew, I didn’t feel good inside. I will write more about my childhood another day, but it was rife with all the things that increase your ACEs score. By 11-12, the age of the photo above, I didn’t want to live anymore. Life was more than I could make sense of, and I was over it, I wanted out. Arbitrarily I decided I probably wasn’t going to make it past 27 years old. I have no idea where I got this very specific number, but it became a focal point. Life felt like a sentence, and I was obligated to exist until then.

It is hard to really explain how you can check out of life that early, but I was a child, I didn’t have to make sense, I just had to believe it. And I believed it. The sentiment stuck: I wasn’t made for this world and by 27, it would all be over. I never actively thought about taking my own life, I really thought my heart would hurt so much it would just stop working and I would be gone. I couldn’t live in that kind of pain forever, right?

It had to end, right?

Right?

I learned to mask these feelings well publicly. I can code switch and out of races, educational status, social groups and diagnosis with ease. I put the Gifted in GATE when I came to not showing how I felt. I lived because I had to, children don’t have many choices after all. I excelled in school because it was the continuous place of normalcy for me. Whatever was going on elsewhere, in school I was “bright”, I had friends, and I felt like regular kid. I thrived there. Childhood friends are often the most shocked by my depression. But you were always smiling, you were always so fun, you seemed so… happy. I know. I know.

Believe it or not, I am still reconciling things from this time and how it impacted me. At home I was labeled emotional and dramatic. I was an annoying cog in the wheel of routine. I was a nuisance with feelings too big in a body too small to do anything about them. Having your feelings minimized so consistently made me an unreliable narrator. I couldn’t trust my feelings and they weren’t safe to experience. It never occurred to me what I was going through contributed to who I am. I was the problem. I believed I was uniquely failing at life.

In 9th grade, which was one of the most difficult years for me, I had a journal. I wrote to God every night asking.

Why was my life like this?

When was he going to fix it?

and What I did to deserve it?

Over and over again.

He never answered and life continued to be more than I could bear. Eventually I stopped writing. I stopped asking. I stopped hoping. I started self-harming and counting down. All I had to do was make it to 27. I could make it to then.

I went through the motions of life, but, I struggled, a lot. An emotional three years later, at 16, I went to college. I was free… ish.

Let me tell you, college saved my life. It did.

But it also almost killed me.