10 Years Later

I remember it like it was yesterday.

It was February 2, 2011. I was midway through my junior year of high school. It was the dead of winter and I was playing through the final missions of the video game Red Dead Redemption, which I had gotten for Christmas a little more than a month before.

I finished the game and in the game I rode my horse past Fort Mercer. In the game, that is where the main events of the story kick off. As I rode past the fort, I put myself into the mindset of the character Jack Marston and I imagined him thinking, “This is where it all started for me and my father.”

A few moments later I saved my game and went upstairs to my bedroom. I couldn’t get that singular thought out of my head of “this is where it all started.”

I can’t really explain why, but that was the beginning of my depression no longer being a constant in my life as it had been for more than two years.

For whatever reason, being in that mindset made me start feeling nostalgic for things from my childhood. Although I was in many ways still a child (I was nearly 17 at the time), I was on the crisp of adulthood and I wanted to feel like a kid again. So I started watching old movies and TV shows that I enjoyed as a kid, and I felt lighter than I had in a long time.

Going back and being nostalgic helped me realize how lucky I was to live this life. It helped snap me out of the funk I had been in for such a long time and I started truly living life, rather than simply just going through the motions.

Writing helped, too. In that time I did way more creative writing than I ever had. I wrote some poetry, lots of fanfiction and even several stories I wrote only for myself that nobody else has seen. Writing has also been therapeutic and cathartic for me and in that time, it really helped me get out of that funk.

Now all this isn’t to say that I don’t have the occasional bad day ever once in a while. Sometimes life gets a bit overwhelming and I pushed back briefly into that dark mood. But now I know it’s valid to feel all those emotions and there’s no shame in feeling them, even as my path to recovery from depression continues and likely won’t ever be finished. I only realized that recently so it’s still a bit of an adjustment to make, but I’m doing my best.

I don’t mean to write this to brag. I do, however, hope that for anyone else feeling depression can see that there is hope. It can take a lot of work to pull yourself out of that funk, and you might slip back into it every once in a while. And that’s okay. Just remember all of your feelings are valid.