Work in Progress

I feel overwhelmingly grateful for the kind responses to my last blog about my experience with depression. I felt very anxious before I posted it but once I had I finally felt very at peace. It felt nice to communicate and be very open and honest about my life. In the past few years I have been increasingly more private on social media. I share photos and large life events but for the most part keep things that happen in my life just to the knowledge of my inner circle. In a way that’s how I like for it to be, but on the other hand I have been thinking a lot recently on aspects of my life I could share and possibly help or, dare I say, entertain others. I can’t really find any reasons anymore to feel ashamed of who I am and with the new lack of that feeling I feel sort of free.

I want there to be a happy medium between being one of those people who posts in inappropriate detail the turmoil of their life online and one who exclusively showcases the best moments of their day on social media. I think at some point everyone has been guilty of allowing themselves to get wrapped up in how great someone’s life looks online.  The truth of the matter is that they’re just a human trying to figure life out just like the rest of us. As someone who grew up during the coming of age of technology and social media I have also been guilty of oversharing. Thank the Lord for that delete button! (or at least thank you to the person who wrote the code for it – the real MVP)

I’m not going to lie recently I have been having a pretty difficult time. It’s ironic given I just wrote what feels like an entire novel about how far I have come. This tends to happen for me just in general but especially during times of stress. I used to deal with stress in very unhealthy ways (i.e. full on mental breakdown, bottle of wine, cover my head with a blanket hoping my problems can’t find me… the usual), but now I find that I can manage it much better. Like with almost everything that managability comes with a price; it’s exhausting to manage great stress healthily. Sometimes I am left feeling quite emotionally and thus physically drained. I’ve just started my final semester of graduate school and I am feeling the pressure. In the next few months I will be finishing my degree, applying for jobs, and figuring out where in the world I will be moving. This all means leaving my employer of more than four years and leaving the place I grew up in that is also home to many people I love. It feels like my teens and early twenties have been a blur of black coffee, neat whiskey, pizza, big decisions, learning, milestones, and change. While I am extremely proud of how far I have come sometimes I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s a path I am not taking out of fear or because I feel like I have a set of expectations I am supposed to live up to.

The truth is, I’ll never live up to the expectations people set for me when I was younger. This is a fact that has weighed on me well into my twenties. My very existence has been crowded with thoughts every time I make a decision that aren’t genuine, aren’t my own.

The other day a friend of mine was jokingly reading some passages out of our senior yearbook people had written me. If I was paid every time someone wrote that I would, “go on to do great things”, I wouldn’t be carrying around student debt in my back pocket. Here I am, seven years, a diploma, and two degrees later, and those words still haunt me just as much as the day they were written. What is hard to realize about those words that are plastered all over paper every time we reach a landmark in life is that they are abstract. All of those words mean something different to different individuals, but I don’t think that necessarily means we shape those ideas on an individual basis. Sometimes what we view as ideal for our life is the culmination of what we have been told will make us happy and successful to the point that the very definitions of happy and successful become clouded.

For a long time I have hidden from these thoughts. I’ve tucked them away like winter clothes, but in the same way the seasons always change; the feelings always come back. I can’t hide anymore from the fact that sometimes I just feel like something is missing or like I am not living up to my potential. Sometimes I fear that I have made all the wrong choices in life or that I won’t follow the right path in the future.

For me this is one of the hardest parts of dealing with depression. It’s like a cloud of darkness following a few steps behind you, waiting for you to trip, so that it can catch up to you. It’s an emptiness that, if you are in a good place, you can only vaguely remember. On the bad days, however, the void is a black hole just waiting for you to inch close enough to be sucked in.

I do think that plenty of people who aren’t suffering from depression still have these thoughts. The truth of all this is that everyone deserves the opportunity to consider what they want most out of life as an individual and take the time to figure out how they can achieve it. I have decided I don’t want to let life pass me by while accepting other people’s perceptions of happiness and success as metrics by which to measure my own. If you feel an emptiness it is okay to wonder why and do your best to move forward. Also, you don’t have to live up to anyone’s expectations. It’s okay to have unique goals that people don’t understand.

My life is a work in progress and I may not be checking off the boxes on the timeline I thought that I would, but that’s okay. My life may not always be this grand adventure I romanticized it to be when I was younger, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fantastic life and that there aren’t incredible things waiting for me in the future. I’ll never live up to the expectations people set for me when I was younger, but maybe, just maybe, I will live up to the ones I set for myself.

-Brooke