A Look Back at 2017 and Dealing with Depression

I know. It's been awhile.

A busy few months had me off the blog/social media bandwagon. I had every intention of posting a reflective new years post in January, but nothing stuck. I'd sit down to write a post, then delete what I had written soon after. This happened a couple times before I realized a reflection/resolution post was probably not going to happen going to come a bit later.

Things have finally calmed down (for a bit anyway), and with the writers block seemingly cleared, here it is.

Warning: This post is pretty candid (ie vulnerable) for me. Forgive me if it seems to ramble or doesn't flow as normal.

Going into 2017, for lack of a better term, I was hype. I had quit my job 3 months prior to the start of the new year and was weeks away from starting a new career at a company I absolutely loved. I was going to travel the world. And this project I had been working on? I was finally going to bring it to life. It was going to be a good year.

The new year came and three weeks in, one of my close friends died suddenly. A few months later, my mom was in a car accident. I was struggling with adjusting to aspects of my new job. Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico and devastated a place that is not just close to my heart, but a place that so many of my friends and coworkers call home. There was drama from so called friends and to top it all off, I got dumped. I was on an emotional rollercoaster that soon started to take its toll on my health. My typically healthy diet was replaced with  fast food and I began gaining weight like crazy. I was suffering from chronic pain and reflux. I was having panic attacks that were so bad that when they started, I thought I was having a heart attack.

With everything going on, I refused couldn't come to terms with was the fact that I was not just depressed, but that I was the most depressed I had ever been in my life. I would wake up feeling pain and sadness, unable to live my day-to-day life normally. I began to isolate myself out of fear of people finding out what was really going on with me. The stigma of mental health made me vulnerable and I feared ridicule.

I typically hate the holidays and I expected this year to be the same, but it wasn't. I started to feel a shift, like maybe I was coming back to life. As the new year approached, I just wanted to keep the momentum going. I knew deep down the one thing that would help me get on that path was therapy, but I was resistant. Therapy would make me feel vulnerable, insecure, and put me out my comfort zone, but I needed it if I was going to get better. Mid-January, I felt myself slipping again and I knew it was time.

Given my schedule, I knew "traditional" therapy would not work for me, so in the most Millennial thing I have ever done, I got a virtual therapist through Talkspace. I was a bit skeptical about it at first but after my intake chat, I was completely onboard with the idea. When I really need to express something, I do best with writing, so this was the perfect setup.



It has been a few months now since I started therapy and I already feel a change in myself. I am truly starting to feel like myself again. My anxiety and stress have decreased a bit and I am having more good days than bad ones. Even when I do have bad days, I have been much better at dealing with them. I am kinder to myself, more forgiving, more understanding. I've accepted that anxiety and depression are things I will have to live with forever, but that I can find ways to manage them. And most importantly that it doesn't define me.

Writing a post like this is way out of my comfort zone for me. But being open about my depression and anxiety has helped me to be more accepting of it and myself. If you're reading this and in a similar situation, hopefully I can encourage you not to give up, to not go it alone and to seek help and support from a friend or a professional. We can get through this.