You're Not Special

by Meghan Rienks

  My instinctive reaction was to blame myself for not being forthcoming with everything that had happened—to fault myself for not being as candid and as open about what I was feeling. On the other hand, when you’re in such a broken state, it’s unnerving. I just felt embarrassed. I was mad at myself for not feeling better. I felt as if I had wasted my parents’ time moving me out, since that didn’t fix how I felt. I mean, obviously it was a necessary step. I can’t even imagine what consequences staying there would have had on me. I wanted so badly to feel good again. I wanted to believe that happiness was a choice, so I tried as hard as I could to be happy. I threw myself into work in LA, even staying out later in the city by myself, shopping, getting coffee, and befriending the people I met on set. I’d accept friendship in any form just to feel a little less lonely. I’d wake up early and fill my day with errands and things to do that got me out of the house. I was petrified of being alone. If I was alone, I didn’t have to pretend to be okay. There was nobody I had to fool and nobody to hold me accountable. There is nothing more terrifying than being scared of yourself.

  Without the blessing of my friends or my family back home, I dropped out of college that spring. I felt like I was disappointing everybody, but staying just wasn’t an option for me. I really did try to move on. For the first time in my life, I made serious headway in contending with my social anxiety. I put myself into social situations despite the terror that would usually ensue. At that time, the depression was so bad, I was ready to try anything to get back to feeling somewhat normal. I went to all my classes, I struck up conversations with anybody I came across, and I went above and beyond to try to foster new relationships that would ease this feeling of worthlessness. I participated more in my sorority’s events than I ever had before. I tried so hard to feel like I belonged somewhere and wasn’t completely broken on the inside. It was too hard. It was too hard to be okay with the fact that everybody knew what had happened and they all chose to ignore it. It was too hard to have gone through the shit that they put me through and know that nobody there had my back. I was as alone as I felt, and I couldn’t do it anymore. My parents begged me to at least finish the year and then take the summer to think about it. They asked what I would do for the remainder of my Riverside lease. Would I just wallow aimlessly in my apartment? They reminded me that if I dropped out, I was 100 percent on my own. If I made that choice, they would not support it emotionally or financially. They asked me what on earth I was planning to do with my life without a college education. They bet me that I would go back: “Just give it a few months; you’ll see.” Dropping out of school without the support of anybody in my life may have been the scariest thing I’ve ever done. But it was also the first time I valued myself more than the opinions of the people around me.

  My lease in Riverside wasn’t up until the start of summer, and with all my friends back home still in school until June, I decided to bide my time in Southern California until then. I spent nearly every day driving from Riverside to LA, taking whatever work I could get to help myself financially.

  I moved to LA in the fall. I was doing okay, not great. But okay was the best I had felt in a year. My expectations were low, which set me up pretty well. I truly believed that if I wanted to be fine, I would be fine. Without realizing it, I figured out my triggers and how to cope with them. I felt important and useful if I was busy, so I kept busy. If I was by myself for extended periods of time, I felt panicked. I found myself hyperventilating and overwhelmed with feelings of great upset I couldn’t shake. So I surrounded myself with any friends I could get. And when I got screwed over again and again, I would turn my camera on, smile, and pretend the audience I was talking to was right in my room. I don’t think I was running away from my problems or ignoring them. I don’t think that putting on a happy face when you feel like shit is lying or unhealthy. I think if you want to feel better, you will do anything in your power to, and that is anything but weak. Did this desperation for normalcy result in some pretty shitty circumstances? Yeah. Did I befriend some people I shouldn’t have, do some things to fit in I don’t entirely stand by, and say things or put forth an image I don’t necessarily wholeheartedly agree with? Yeah. But I don’t regret the intentions behind my actions. I was living in spite of how I felt—not out of denial, but out of resilience and sheer determination.

  After a while I began to realize that I was never going to feel “normal” again. I began to accept my current state as my new normal. I’d rather settle for this person I had become than strive toward an unreachable goal. Deep down, I knew the depression wasn’t situational. It had been more than a year since Riverside, and I wasn’t “adjusting to change.” I had changed. It wasn’t a three-month window of me “getting over it”; it wasn’t ending. So I continued to cope, unaware that my bouts of inexplicable hollowness and hysterical episodes of sheer panic indicated anything that might require attention. It wasn’t an ideal situation, obviously, but it was what I had, and that was okay with me.

  Then my best friend Sydney moved to LA for a summer internship, and I was nothing short of ecstatic. Having her around made me feel whole and like I was home again.

  Sydney takes care of me in ways I don’t know how to take care of myself. She’ll say she took the internship in LA for the experience, but I think she also took it for me. Without ever addressing it, I think Sydney could sense the change in me. If she couldn’t be there for me year-round, she’d spend the summer collecting people for me who could. In that one summer I was more social and adventurous than I had ever been since moving to Southern California. Sydney was like my security blanket. I felt better about myself when she was around. I got out of my own head, and in doing so I was able to let people in.

  When Sydney headed back to school at the end of summer, our goodbyes were easier than I expected they’d be. While nobody could ever replace her, she left me in LA better than she had found me. We had all celebrated my twenty-first birthday together in Vegas, and my new legality opened a whole new pool of social prospects. I had even started dating a guy earlier that summer. I felt like I had a grasp on where my life was headed, and I actually felt like I had a say in it. I was happy. Really, really happy. The kind of happy where the thought that it might be too good to be true doesn’t even cross your mind. Or at least it didn’t cross my mind.

  One specific day in October sticks out as the day it all came crashing down. I’m sure it happened slowly, but it felt like it hit me all at once. I must have woken up at five or six a.m. I hadn’t been sleeping well for the previous week, and that day was no exception. As I lay there in bed next to my boyfriend of the past three months, I felt smothered by this feeling of darkness. My chest felt tight and constricted, and the ache in my body felt like it would pull me straight through the floor. I had tried to shake this feeling all week. I thought if I didn’t validate it, maybe it would just go away. But it felt like I had left my body, and an unprepared understudy had taken my place. My boyfriend and I had made plans to go to brunch, but I begged him to cancel and let me sleep in. He refused, so I begrudgingly dragged myself out of bed, threw on sunglasses and shoes, wore my slept-in pajamas, and ignored his disapproving look as we walked toward the café. He didn’t ask me what was wrong. He’d asked that question earlier that week, and my answer of “I don’t know; I’m just feeling really down” was not sufficient in his eyes, so he didn’t ask me again. I couldn’t have spoken more than five words at brunch. It was all I could do not to burst into tears at the restaurant. I could feel the room getting smaller and smaller. The music was building, and every sound of every knife against a plate seemed to be amplified. I thought I was going to shatter into a million pieces. Staring at my uneaten food, I said the first thought that came to my mind: “I think I need to go home to my parents’ house for a while.” I could feel his eyes digging into me, but I refused to look up. “With me, you mean?” he asked, his fists white from clutching his cutlery. I whispered, “Alone.” As the word left my mouth, his fi
sts hit the table with a BANG! He stood up, knocking his chair over in the now-silent restaurant. All eyes were on us as he stormed out, leaving me fighting tears and fumbling in my wallet for cash. He spent the walk back to the apartment apologizing, stroking my hair, and saying he was sorry for getting upset. I just needed to understand that he loved me so much that the thought of me wanting to spend time away from him made him sad. He forgave my lapse in judgment, and he knew I didn’t mean it. When we got back inside, I grabbed my laptop and settled back into bed. I positioned my body so his eyes couldn’t see the screen as I began to type in a same-day flight search for San Francisco. I didn’t even make it past the Google results before he slammed my laptop shut. This was when I lost it. The tears I had been fighting back streamed down my face as I collapsed into hysterics. He cradled me, cooing soft words and kissing my head. Through the tears, I managed to spit out the words I was running away from for so long: “I think I’m depressed.” As soon as I said it, I regretted it. His once warm and consoling demeanor turned back to the angry, white-fisted guy at brunch. “You’re not depressed,” he said to me, his voice cold and piercing. “You have nothing to be depressed about. You don’t know what it’s like to be depressed. I know what it’s like to be depressed. I have faced actual shit in my life. You have no fucking idea what that even means, Meghan.” He went on like this as I lay facing the wall, my shoulders shuddering with sobs. At some point he left. Instead of feeling a sense of relief, I felt more scared than before. The thought of being alone terrified me. What scared me even more were the thoughts I had. I had never before been so afraid of what I might do, so I booked myself a one-way flight that night, and I texted my family that I was coming home.

  I spent the first two days ignoring my boyfriend’s calls and evading questions from my parents. I took Benadryl to fall asleep. If I wasn’t sleeping, I was crying. I didn’t know how to explain what was happening, because I didn’t know. I couldn’t bring myself to tell my parents why I had come home. I was embarrassed and ashamed to admit that I was scared of what I would do if I was left alone. At some point my mom told me she thought this might be due to a thyroid imbalance, so she made an appointment for me to get blood work done. I nodded in agreement, it could be a thyroid problem. Google says it can mess with your emotions, so that must be it. I really wanted that to be it. I couldn’t figure out how I had gotten to where I was, and I wanted there to be a reason and a solution. The doctor’s office called. They had time to go over my lab results if we came in later that afternoon. I remember sitting in the waiting room in a pair of my high school sweatpants and the same flannel shirt I had worn all week. I had my glasses on and my unkempt hair was thrown into a haphazard ponytail. I looked about as terrible as I felt. I can’t imagine what other people thought when they saw us: my mom casually leafing through an old Oprah magazine and me curled up in a ball, staring blankly ahead. When my doctor called us into her office, she did a quick once-over of my current state and began scanning her clipboard. She told me everything had come back normal. I was still in the anemic range, but that was old news. My thyroid was fine and my levels were in the clear. My face fell. My mom’s brow furrowed. She questioned the doctor about what exactly they had tested. We were probably the only two people she had ever come across who were so visibly distraught by a clean bill of health. She asked what we were hoping to find. Before I could put it into words, my mom told her that I was “feeling down.” She seemed to think it was a side effect of a multitude of curable and treatable things. “I’ll be right back,” the doctor said as she slipped out of the room. She reappeared with a new clipboard and pen, which she handed to me with a sympathetic smile. I looked down at the questionnaire in my hand. The title read “Mental Health Assessment.” My eyes welled up with tears just reading those three words. “Because you’re over eighteen and a legal adult, I have to ask you: Would you like your mother to stay in the room, or would you rather fill this out alone?” the doctor said to me. My mom crossed her arms. “I’d rather be alone if that’s okay,” I said to the floor. She nodded, ushered my mom out, and shut the door behind her.

  It was the first time I didn’t cheat on a test, though I did downplay it. Reading on paper some of the thoughts I was having made them seem scarier and more worrisome than they sounded in my head. In a way, it should have made me feel less crazy. If nobody else ever thought or felt these things, then they wouldn’t be on this test. But at the same time it made me feel completely crazy. The things I thought were normal to feel were nothing of the sort. I answered almost everything honestly, and before I could scribble out or change my answers, the door opened and the doctor came to collect it. She told me that she’d read it over and would be back in a minute to discuss the results. As I sat there on the crinkly paper on the examination table, I tried to steady my breathing and compose myself. If the results were bad, I would pretend I misread the questions. She came back a minute later and sat next to me. She told me that I had scored a level of severe clinical depression that required them to suggest I look into an outpatient mental health facility. I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I curled my legs up onto the bed and sobbed. The hysterics dwindled down to manageable cries, and I lifted my head from my legs as she asked me, “Do you want me to tell your mom?” I nodded, and she was gone. When she returned, she was accompanied by my mother. My mom asked what other tests they could run and what other, bigger issues could be causing this. Was the birth control I was on recalled? Had they checked my hormonal levels and anything else that could cause this? The doctor assured her that they had but agreed to run more tests. My mom looked at me with an expression of pity and said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to figure out what’s actually wrong.” It was supposed to be comforting, I think, but all it did was make me feel guilty. I knew the results would all come back normal and I’d have nothing to blame this feeling on other than myself.

  I never checked into a facility. That wasn’t even a discussion. I went off my birth control and any medications I was on that might possibly have something to do with my “emotional issues.” My mom asked if my boyfriend had caused this. I told her no but that he wasn’t helping, either. We agreed I should break up with him. She asked about work in LA: Was my team causing this? I told her no, but they weren’t helping, either. We agreed I should get new representation. Then I booked my flight back to LA.

  My boyfriend and I broke up. I took a break from social media for about two weeks. When it came time for me to upload a video, I couldn’t fake it. I couldn’t get on camera and pretend to be bubbly and happy and talk about things as trivial as my favorite sweatshirt. I knew that people would see right through it, and the shitstorm of hateful comments would just kick me even further down. So I turned on my camera and said the only thing on my mind for the past month: “I’m depressed.” I posted it, closed my laptop, turned my phone off, and slipped into a NyQuil-induced slumber.

  The feedback I woke up to was insane. My inbox on every platform was filled with so much love and support from people I knew and people I didn’t. My high school friends were calling me around the clock, Facetiming me between their classes, and collectively ensuring that I felt their long-distance love twenty-four hours a day. I was getting emails and Facebook messages from people I knew all over saying that they had been through what I had. They’d end it with their phone number and an open invitation for friendship. All these people I knew and interacted with had struggled with this in various forms, and for the first time since that doctor read my test results, my diagnosis didn’t feel as unusual as it did before.

  It’s been a process, to say the least. You cannot battle depression alone. As solitary as the illness feels, it’s something you can’t keep to yourself. You need a support system of friends and professionals, people to check in on you and hold you accountable for how you treat yourself. There is a misconception that asking for help means that you’re weak, but I think asking for help is the strongest thing you can do. I used to feel defeated
because I couldn’t choose happiness no matter how hard I tried. I put so much pressure and blame on myself for my depression when in reality it’s something so much bigger than me. With professional help I learned about the chemicals that are released in your brain that cause happiness, how some people are born with an imbalance from the start, and others fluctuate throughout their whole lives. That was out of my control. I can’t control everything, but I control what I can. I set myself up for success, putting myself in the best possible position to be happy. That means therapy, psychiatrist appointments, staying on top of medications, filling my schedule with work, getting enough sleep, eating the right foods, staying organized, and surrounding myself with people who make me want to be a better person. Some days are better than others, but that’s how it goes. The bad days might be bad weeks or bad months, but as long as you treat them as the outliers and not the norm, you are moving through it. When things get really dark, I try to find happiness in the little things, like morning coffee, or a funny meme. If you add enough of them together, they make a big thing.