Gideon.

Twenty Seventeen.

I had always felt not quite right…

When I was eleven I was diagnosed with Anxiety. That's something I had learnt to live but 2017 felt different. The anxiety began to suffocate me and I was feeling more sad then stressed. The world around me started to feel different, I didn’t feel apart of it anymore. I felt like I was watching my body from afar and had little to no control of it. I was sixteen and in my tenth year of schooling, I had started to slowly disappear from my friends. Instead of going five days a week like I was supposed to, I was only going three or four. I couldn’t get out of bed some mornings but I was still keeping up with work, so no one really noticed how bad I was getting. It wasn’t until the end of 2017 when I had little to no friends left and was only attending one to two days a week… I was no longer keeping up with my work and was at risk of failing the entire year. My friends and I never had a falling out or anything, I just wasn’t present enough in our friendship and they eventually gave up on me. My mother took me to a doctor early December of that year, three days before my seventeen birthday… that's when I was diagnosed with depression. They started me on a low dose of antidepressants but they weren’t really helping, I was told to give it three months before they looked at different options.

Twenty Eighteen.

It had been one month since I had started on my medication… I felt somehow worse though. I had managed to pass my tenth year of schooling and was set to start my eleventh year in a week. The holidays have been eventless, I had only fallen further and further into the wormhole. I was staying up to 4 am and sleeping into 1 or 2 pm. I had begun to lose touch with reality. I hadn’t left the house much in weeks.

It was the day of the start of the school year when things started to turn weird. I was absolutely terrified to go back to school where I had no friends and no interest in learning… Luckily they had me on a half-day plan so I didn’t run into my ex-friends all that much. It was on my way home that day when I first met Gideon.

Gideon was an owl who lived in the woods I walked through on my way home from school… The walk home was quick, it took about twenty minutes to get through the woods and an extra five minutes to walk through the streets to get to my house. I used to dread the walk through the woods as I was afraid but I had grown to love it, I didn’t fear the darkness of the woods, I welcomed it.

Gideon was waiting on a tree about halfway through the woods, I initially noticed him because he was stunning. He was mostly white with some dark details. I didn’t pay all that attention to him that day, but I did the next day…

On my way home from school the next day, I began my regular track through the words and I stumbled across Gideon again. It could have been another owl but somehow I knew It was the same owl I had encountered the day before. Once again I didn’t pay too much attention until he began to follow me and appear every couple of trees. It scared me, I’ll be honest... but still I didn’t think all that much of it.

That night I was crying in my room for a reason I didn’t quite know, I was just constantly on the verge of tears. That was the night I tried cutting myself… I went to the shower and was shaving my legs. I paid much attention to the way the razor glided on my legs, I decided to try pushing the razor deeper into my skin until I drew blood. I loved the way it felt. When I got out of the shower, I grabbed a fresh razor on the way out. I googled how to break it open and followed the instructions until I had myself a sharp small blade. I glided it across my thigh and it drew blood quickly… I did it again and again and again… line after line. I must’ve done ten or eleven individual cuts that night. When I was done I felt relieved and calm, like that weight had been temporally lifted and I could breathe a little, I focused on the blood coming out of the cuts. I put the razor in my bedside drawer and wiped my leg with a tissue or two, it was then I heard something outside my bedroom window.

I looked out my window and it was Gideon on the tree outside. I couldn’t help but think he was following me, was he a curse of some sort? I was starting to get all scared and superstitious. I pulled my curtains across so I couldn’t see him. I then went to bed.

The next morning before I went to school I scratched at some of my cuts until they bled again.

A couple of hours later when I got home from school I went to take my jeans off and it hurt, the blood and skin seemed to stick to the inside of my jeans… I went directly to the shower afterwards and that stung even more… I enjoyed the pain.

Four weeks later I was at my worst, I started to see Gideon on a daily occurrence. It was two weeks before I was set to see my doctor again when I made an attempt on my life. I took a bunch of my antidepressants and ended up in the hospital having to get my stomach pumped. That was when everyone started to take my depression more seriously. I was checked into a mental hospital two towns over.

A couple of days went by and I was feeling slightly better. Until I saw an owl outside my window, I was sure it was Gideon. I started to freak out, I was afraid and became convinced that Gideon was the cause of all the recent events and my recent turmoil. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense… He began to come along when I started to get worse. I was never this bad before he starting showing up in my life. Could he be some type of curse? Is this some ghost taking out some form of revenge on me?

It was two weeks before I was scheduled to be released when I decided to tell my doctor in the centre about Gideon and he recommended I stayed an extra four weeks in the centre. This caused me a lot of anger as I was looking forward to being released and felt like I was going insane locked up in the centre.

I didn’t feel like I belonged there, there were people there with real problems and I was just a waste of space. I was over this place, It made me regret ever attempting to kill myself, I was so angry and embarrassed I failed. I really wish I hadn’t…

Twenty Nineteen.

Things were so much better this January then the one before, I hadn’t self-harmed in six months and I had finally found a medication that worked. I didn’t even think about ending my life anymore. I was on my last year of schooling and my grades were great… I had even reconnected with some of my old friends. I also made some new ones, I was doing incredible. I was feeling better than I ever had. Things were looking up.

When June came along though, I was starting to go downhill again… I was getting crushed by the weight of school work and constantly having to keep up with and be there for my friends. I ran into Gideon in the woods again… I then started to break down again. He started following me around just like he used to and I felt like I was under his curse. For the first time In months, I relapsed and cut again. Before things got worse I let my mother know and we went to the doctor again, they decided it was best for me to check into the centre I had been in before… After many group workshops and therapy sessions, I got to learn more about Gideon. It turns out he was never real, I struggled to believe it at first but it was true. My therapist told me he was merely a representation of my current state of depression. She told me it was no curse, he turned up every time I was going downhill… He was like my brain giving me a warning signal. He wasn’t a bad thing, he was helpful. Whenever I began to see Gideon it meant I needed to take a step back and prioritise my mental wellbeing. I had to let my mother know whenever I began to see Gideon again. Knowing all this I could take control over my brain, I felt so much better with this knowledge… For the first time ever, I could make sense of my thoughts.

Twenty Twenty.

It was April and I was moving my items into an apartment in the city of Melbourne. That had felt like an impossible dream for so long. I never thought I’d make it here. I had graduated from school late last year and landed a job in an office at my cousins business. I was living the dream… I still see Gideon from time to time but instead of seeing him as a curse, I see him as a friend. I know I have to live alongside him, he is a part of me. I just have to learn to deal with him appropriately and take him seriously…

I appreciate you and your presence,

Gideon.