Me, Myself & Depression
By: Shanese Harper
Tags: Depression, College, PTSD, Mental Health

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

I never thought I’d be sitting down one day telling the world my story. I’ve always thought about writing this and maybe posting it to my blog but a topic like this doesn’t fit my blog’s current aesthetic. The only problem that I have with telling my story right now is that I don’t know where to start.

College & Depression

I guess it all started during my second year in college or maybe before that. What I do know is that a good chunk of my depression stems from my college days. I always thought about going to my college’s therapist but I only signed up and never went to a session. Why? Probably because I pushed what was making me depressed to the side, got lazy and decided that I couldn’t be bothered to go anymore.

My depression would hit me in waves occasionally. I say occasionally because every time I was close to seeing my period (PMSing Queen), some random thought, some bad visual from a past event would come to my mind and I’d start crying and feeling totally bad about myself. I even self-diagnosed myself with PTSD because whatever that event was, was so traumatic that it made me sink into this dark hole and I couldn’t help myself.

Another thing that caused my depression was the fact that I was completely unhappy with the major I chose. Sure the reason I started it was a good one and it was far too late for me to switch. Plus my parents would have had a problem with that because it meant I’d spend a much longer time in college and well, the long and short of it is that my father would have a huge problem with it.

What was my college major? Computer Science. Am I passionate about it? Not at all and that loss of passion led me to suffer greatly in a few of my classes. It just was not the right fit for me because my passion and my interests were somewhere else. The funny thing about it too was that I never really pursued them 100% with the exception to one thing — my blog, Jus’ Harpz.

Blogging & Depression

I started blogging in December 2017 and I was pretty much a novice, obviously. I had no training — I just right jumped into it because I wanted to share my thoughts with people hoping that they would have the same thoughts as me. Blogging for me, when I started, was a way for me to escape reality a little bit.

Then I started to get serious about blogging — wanting to make money from it, wanting to gain subscribers, you know all the works. I won’t lie to you, it’s challenging and you lose motivation so many times. And I would think that being Jamaican plus living in Jamaica and being an introvert were a factor in me to being able to be as successful as I wanted to be in the blogging realm.

But that wasn’t it. It was the constant comparison, lack of motivation, always watching the numbers and never thinking about my sanity. And the lack of engagement from my followers on social media no matter how hard I tried to get them to talk to me. It got me depressed and I thought so many times about throwing in the towel, paying my friend back for helping me start it (I’m still going to pay them back) and deleting everything I created that’s related to my blog. I haven’t made a single post to my blog since March and that last post was my favourite and yet it didn’t receive a lot of traction as I hoped it would.

I’d love to go back to blogging part-time. I’ve made so many plans to rebrand, I’ve written posts that have been in drafts since April, I’ve had so many ideas for new posts but I’m afraid that I won’t be welcomed by the people that follow my blog’s Twitter, Facebook and Instagram account because I’ve been gone for so long. And while I try to engage with every single person, no one wants to give me the time of day and that too does add to my depression and my fear of going back to blogging.

PTSD & Depression

Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve been through a lot. And most of the trauma that I’ve experienced has a lot to do with my father. Yeah, I have daddy issues and I’m not afraid to say it. Just thinking about the emotional and mental abuse from my parents (not counting my mother out) brings me to a very dark place. And I do get flashbacks to the events that have caused me a lot of pain.

The sad thing about it is that they don’t understand and they have absolutely no idea how the words that they’ve spewed have negatively affected me. I spoke to my mother once about it and naturally, I started crying because I’m reliving the situation and she just brushes it to the side like my feelings didn’t matter.

My parents will never understand and I do understand why. When they were growing up, they didn’t have any emotional or mental support from their parents. And unknowing to them, they haven’t realized how much they’re emulating their parents’ parenting skill. I can’t blame them but it really does affect me A LOT!

My Depression & Me

I suppress my depression a lot. Well, practically all the time. Sometimes I like to blame my depression for me not being able to do what I truly want to do with my life. I’m relatively young and I have my whole life ahead of me but I feel so much pressure from today’s society, social media and everything around me. I feel like I’m not enough, I’m not doing enough and I’m not doing what it is that I feel like I should be doing. I feel like I’m wasting my life away and I know that I’m the only person that can turn my life around.

It’s so much easier said than done when I tell myself to stop being so unproductive and actually do something. But if you feel like everything is against you then what can you do? Like I said I’m young, I’m almost 23 and I guess your 20s is that time of your life where you don’t have everything together and it seems like everyone else does.

I know I’m not alone in this depression struggle. I know that there are a lot more persons out in the world that are suffering far deeper than I am but I just had to share my story a little. You know those Twitter and Instagram captions “Felt cute, might delete later”, well this is my “Felt like sharing my story, might delete later” moment without the picture. With that being said, this is my story and thank you for reading.