I hadn't lived in Boston very long when I met my first real boyfriend. The beginning was, as it always is, intensely lovely. I instantly fell madly in love with him. I really, truly believed we were going to get married and have beautiful babies and live happily ever after.
And I really, truly believed this not just because I was so in love, but because I ignored a lot of red flags. I ignored all the long periods when he was so high-strung and nervous that he depended on a combination of weed and Nyquil to get to sleep. I ignored the times when he'd sleep entire weekends away and resist going anywhere or doing much of anything. I ignored the OCD, the jealousy, the obsession with obtaining alcohol (and weed) above most other things. I ignored his unwillingness to admit that there was something more going on with him than simple depression -- and that a bottle of anti-depressants, prescribed by his pediatrician from another state, couldn't fix everything.
Once he got to the point of having suicidal thoughts, it took only a few weeks for the relationship to completely deteriorate. I still loved him passionately, but it was too much responsibility for me to be his primary source of support. He couldn't accept that. The details are somewhat irrelevant now, but eventually, I was forced to file a restraining order against him. The day I faced him in court was probably the most devastating day of my entire life. I had never cried so much in one day before that, nor have I since.
By that point, I had fallen far behind in all of my classes at Northeastern. All the drama (and I've left out quite a bit of it) made it impossible to focus. My professors were as understanding as they could be and extended many deadlines, but every time I sat down to do school work, I was completely overwhelmed. For the first time in my life, I started having panic attacks.
I finally recognized that if I tried to finish out the semester, I would fail. It became obvious that the only viable option was to take a medical/mental health leave of absence, putting Incompletes on my transcript for all my classes, and take the rest of the semester (as well as the following one) to get my life back together.
I felt strongly (against the advice of many people) that the best way to gain strength from such an awful situation was to stay here in Boston, away from my best friend and my family, and push through the sadness and panic myself. It wasn't easy. I had to work a full-time retail job plus a part-time job working the door at a bar just to pay the most basic bills. I ate as little and as cheaply as possible. I was sick from exhaustion nearly the entire time and had no insurance to go to the doctor. I had no financial help and little emotional support, especially as a relative newcomer to Boston. My parents worried that I wouldn't return to school and regularly questioned my decision. I had frequent nightmares about my ex breaking into my apartment and trying to kill me. I felt utterly alone.
But the truth was that I, like my ex, had issues that I'd been unwilling to confront for a very long time. I had always had bouts of depression and anxiety, and I'd always been insanely insecure -- and of course, like everyone, there were things from my past (both in my childhood and more recently) that I'd never fully processed. I acknowledged this to myself, but I was ashamed to acknowledge it to anyone else. As traumatic as the experience with my ex had been, in some strange way it liberated me; I finally had a reason to seek the help I had needed for most of my life. It was a turning point. I began weekly therapy for the duration of my leave of absence, and I continued to see my therapist for a long time after. When I went back to school (as I'd always known I would), I was highly successful, earning solid A's and generally kicking butt for the remainder of my college career.
I took a break from therapy for awhile, once I felt like I'd eliminated most of my PTSD symptoms, and I came off the anti-depressants I'd been prescribed. A few years later, when my job situation became unbearable (and the panic attacks returned), I started again. I also used anti-anxiety medications for about a year, despite the protests of a few people who are close to me. Throughout all of this I have realized that, for me, mental health work is never done, and therapy is a key tool in keeping me a relatively sane and happy person; I've realized that none of this makes me defective or broken or less valuable than anyone else; I've realized that I know myself best, so it's up to me (with some help from my doctor) to figure out how to make my life better, even if it occasionally invites negative judgment from outsiders.
And though I wish mental health issues on no one, I feel some measure of comfort knowing that many of my friends struggle with similar issues. I don't know if we're naturally drawn together, if we recognize that feeling of brokenness in each other, or if everybody is equally screwed up and some are just better at hiding it than others. It doesn't matter, really -- I just hope they know that it is a show of great strength, not weakness, to ask for help.
And everybody needs a little help, every now and then.
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