A Blurry Past

For the longest time, I always looked back at my high school days as the eye before my mental health storm. When I finished, in 2007, almost every connection was severed and disregarded. Within 12 months of that time, I was in the process of seeing my first psychologist, thoughts swirling around self-harm and depression stepping out of an imaginary shadow. From then on, the prevailing thought of mine has been that that me is the real me. To feel almost consumed in a liquid of depression that is inescapable, and whenever I begin to reflect on myself before that time, there’s a sense of denial, of having ignored the signs not seen until it was too late.

So why is it that on a random 5am thought, somewhere between sleep denial and an overwhelming sense of sadness, does it dawn on me that my thinking of the past overlooked the true importance of that time: I was enjoying the present.

As someone who likes to believe in thinking of every possibility, it’s a jolt to the core of how I allowed myself to believe in such a thing; that my past was a precursor to today. For someone who has parroted a line about questioning one’s own motivation and thoughts…for myself to have disregarded what was the turning point of my life, is marginally mind blowing.

Looking at recent messages with my closest friend, and realising how my own idea of the past was so terrible that it’s on par with horrific and traumatic events, yet the reality of it was far less devastating than it was of being a lie. A fabrication that my mind formed, that was sculpted and magnified by my depression.

These are instances where processing such information becomes critical, and yet, there’s a part of me that knows it cannot be done efficiently. The truth is that I partly knew of this years ago. I think I did. Maybe it’s my current state that doubts that claim, or perhaps it’s another veil of fog thrown up by my depression in an effort to keep me grounded to those concrete beliefs. If there’s one thing that can bring a person’s downfall, it’s of having their foundations being tested against something that it was never prepared for.

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