The Light at the End of the Tunnel

When I was nine years old, as I later read in my mother's journal, my grandmother and I were in a car accident that left me with a traumatic brain injury to my frontal lobe and a broken leg. My grandmother passed two years later when going into operation for a stroke she'd had two weeks prior.

At the age of twelve, I developed symptoms of depression and severe panic disorder, which is known as an anxiety disorder where the sufferer avoids places he or she has had panic attacks, thus subconsciously creating more anxiety and a pattern of avoidance.

My world, as you can imagine, got smaller and smaller. I did not have the resources available to me to put into words what was going on with me, so I suffered in silence for three years before things started to get worse. Much worse. If I'd known at the time what I know now, that I was suffering from a mental illness, and that there were tools I could use to fight back, maybe I wouldn't have suffered for so long; but I also would have missed out on the knowledge and self awareness that I now have. "Someday," said Ovil Paul, and oh, how he was right, "this pain will be useful to you."

I was diagnosed with anxiety after a nine month bout of difficulty swallowing solid foods and a heavy pressure on my chest. I was diagnosed with depression at sixteen when my mother started to realize how deeply unhappy I was. I remember walking into the children's clinic, my steps shaky, heads sweaty, feeling smaller than a six year old child. At sixteen years old, I felt like this. I wondered what was so wrong with me that I was almost a legal adult and had let this go on for years before saying something.

The doctor talked to me briefly, but all I really murmured was "I don't know." My mother did most of the talking, and I was diagnosed with depression and given a prescription for Paxil. Two years later, the depression and anxiety had gotten so much worse. I had anxiety attacks, one after another, in just one class which lasted an hour. I noticed if I didn't sit by the door in my classes, I'd have more panic attacks.

At eighteen, I found a strength inside of me that I didn't know I was capable of. I saw my first therapist and finally revealed a little to her. I threw myself into research pertaining to depression and anxiety and came to understand mental illnesses very well-at least, as much as I could, being a biased party and having looked up information on the computer.

At twenty-one, I had been through 20 antidepressant medications that failed to help my depression. I had extensive experience with meditation, yoga, acupuncture, chiropractor work, various therapy types such as CBT, DBT, ACT, EMDR. Everything failed, but my self awareness increased. My confidence in myself increased, yet, still, the depression wouldn't loosen its grip on me.

The antidepressants kept the anxiety from spiraling into panic attacks, but they did not touch the depression. Feeling broken and at the end of my rope, I decided to avoid Shock Therapy and tried out something called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation instead. This uses magnets to stimulate certain neurons in your brain. It wasn't painful, just a hard thudding against my head and a loud noise in my ears for an hour every day for six weeks.

This, too, failed. After Ketamine Infusions failed as well, something legally administered by doctors in the USA that is known to help difficult to treat cases of depression temporarily, my doctor and I made the decision to put me on Parnate, an MAOI antidepressant.

With the help of this drug, and the trial and error of many drugs including Ritalin, we discovered that I not only suffered from depression and anxiety, but also from ADHD and PTSD on top of having had a brain injury. Parnate gave me relief like I couldn't remember feeling for even a single moment since I was twelve years old. It helped me to finally have a life, a fresh start.

It allowed me to put into place those coping techniques I had learned, that logically, I understood fully and recognized their benefits on other people, but not me. So I threw myself into every coping skill I'd ever learned, and slowly, so slowly, I began to arrange the puzzle pieces of my life into something that worked for me; maybe a piece was missing, but that didn't mean I was faulty. The puzzle still formed a picture, and that picture became my life. And when I look back on these sixteen long, excruciating years of my life, despite feeling sad for the time I missed out on, the memories I could have made, I find myself taking strength from the pain and not only being okay, but also finding myself thriving in a scary, uncertain world. The world opened up to me slowly. I opened the doors of the box I'd lived in, and I crawled my way out, bit by bit, until I could see the light. So it didn't matter that a piece of the puzzle was missing. I learned to work with it, to use it, that hole in my life, that hole of time where I'd missed out on so much, to push me forward, because I knew that I had been through the darkest recesses of hell, and I'd managed to come out on the other side.

If I can do that, I can do anything.