The sky was gray the day I thought about jumping off the Smithfield Street Bridge.
Everything was gray, really, in Pittsburgh that summer. The sky, layered with clouds. The sidewalk. The water. The cars. My mind was blank as I crossed the bridge, a path I’d followed dozens of times before between my parking space and my apartment.
My eyes glazed over. I couldn’t hear the music in my headphones. I stopped on the pavement and leaned against the cold railing of the bridge, gazing down at the choppy water. The air around me felt too heavy.
Would anyone try to stop me? Was it a far enough drop to kill me? How cold was the water in July?
Would I really want to die?
Under that blue arch I thought about how easy the motions would be: one leg over, then the other. Then just let go.
I closed my eyes. I breathed in the thick air, drawing deep into my lungs, but it choked me.
In that moment, when my time stood still, people kept talking, laughing, listening to music, flirting, fighting, feeling. It seemed like I hadn’t felt anything in a hundred years.
I looked back down. I thought about the pain that grasped at me every day. It would be a way out.
It would be so easy.
***
I was never formally diagnosed with depression until I was 20 years old and halfway through my college career, but that was far from the first time I felt it.
When I finally did seek professional help, my therapist suggested I was dealing with “double depression” — a term I’d never heard before that describes a condition of major depression overlying years of dysthymia, or a more minor, steady low mood.
On top of this, I started having trouble breathing, sleeping, slowing my mind. We added anxiety to my list. Physically and mentally, I obsessed over everything that happened in my life: OCD. I’d been blessed with a trifecta of mental problems during what people call the “best four years of your life.”
Depression doesn’t really have a definition in our modern social climate. It’s become such a commonplace word, meaning little more than “kind of sad” and used so dramatically in colloquial speech that its usage as a label for a serious mental disease has become more or less obsolete.
But the world — and this campus — is full of people who hurt when they hear that word, “depression,” used like it means nothing. I wish I felt the kind of disappointment people refer to when they comment that something is “so depressing.” That kind of depression doesn’t leave your body aching.
Depression is not the flu or a broken arm. You can’t see it, and for that reason, it often goes unnoticed. But, while it trails slightly behind anxiety in many medical studies, an American Psychological Association study found in recent years, up to 30 percent of college students have seriously considered suicide.
Psych Central has reported that close to half of all college students have admitted to feeling depressive symptoms throughout their years at university.
The condition is not, as a Google image search suggests, exclusively people wearing dark clothes, curled against a wall in a lightless room with their knees to their chests.
Is that depression?
Yes. Sometimes. For some people. Sometimes it’s me, but depression looks different for everyone.
More often than not, it is invisible or well-disguised. And it’s everywhere. And people aren’t talking about it.
***
The first thing I learned about mental illness is that it’s inconsiderate.
As depression and anxiety came into my life full force as an upperclassman in college, it was pretty clear they didn’t care at all I was trying to execute a circus act of balancing work, school, me time and a social life.
I’d already perfected my everything-is-great face, so nobody noticed as it creeped in and started to steal parts of me. Sometimes I didn’t notice, between my polished posts on social media and the forced smiles in pictures. I’d make a bet you couldn’t find one picture of me frowning during the worst of it.
Working through college while battling depression feels nearly impossible to me at times. A term paper just stops seeming important when you don’t care if you live or die.
But my depression takes what it wants, when it wants it. It might take all of my energy one day, my motivation the other. For a time it stole the entirety of my passion for my career, all of my drive to write. It steals my hunger, then my ability to cook and clean and sleep and go outside and be around other people.
All the while, as depression locked away pieces of myself that seemed to have left me entirely, it yelled at me. My depression has a voice, and it’s loud. And persistent.
One day, I somehow found the energy during a bad depressive episode to write down everything that voice in my head wouldn’t stop screaming.
Helpless, I scrawled. Hopeless. Guilty. Bad girlfriend. Unappreciative. I don’t try hard enough. I could be better, but I choose not to be. Confused. Aimless. Irrational. Isolated.
And I believed every single one of those things in that moment. My depression consumed my thoughts, my head, my whole body. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
I can’t remember what triggered the episode, but it never really mattered — it was almost always something seemingly insignificant. A flat tire, a broken pen, no free seats at Barnes and Noble.
I started to drop my IU classes because even one class’s worth of assignments already seemed like too much for me to wrap my head around. What I couldn’t drop, I skipped as much as I could.
I needed people to stop asking me about my future. Didn’t they know I was just trying to get through the next hour?
The hectic atmosphere at a university like IU has been wonderful for me at times, and I’ve loved college. But my last two years weren’t what I thought they’d be.
Campus made me panic because I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. Classes made me anxious. Work was a responsibility and I didn’t feel like I could commit to anything because my mood changes were so sporadic. I was often too depressive to want to be in any social situations.
I don’t try hard enough, I’d written in that blue notebook in my bathroom. I can never give people what they deserve.
I felt sick rereading that list for the first time in months, but in the moment, it seemed so clear those words were the truth.
It’s still how I feel sometimes. There are days I lay in bed and contort my body to try and ease the physical pain that comes with the mental anguish. Days I go from feeling burning to numbness to exhaustion to anxiety. Days I pray to a god I don’t even believe in because it hurts so much.
My stomach drops when I re-read the last four words on the page.
It will never end.
***
At first glance, I probably don’t seem like a prime candidate for major depression. Ask anyone who’s known me for the past four years, and they would probably say it seems impossible for someone who smiles so much and wears as many bows in her hair as I do to hurt like that.
But it hit me, and it hit hard. At the beginning, it was chaos.
I stopped looking both ways when I crossed busy streets. I didn’t worry about walking alone in a city at night anymore. I drove too fast in thunderstorms, almost hoping for an accident.
My personal relationships suffered. My mom admitted she was nervous to see me for the first time in five months when we reunited in the summer, unsure of how dealing with my depression might have changed me.
I didn’t know how to talk to people, and people didn’t know how to talk to me. It was difficult at times to continue conversations with people who didn’t understand, because there’s a laundry list of things you can’t really say to a depressed person.
When I had to miss school or work, telling my boss or professor why I’d been absent resulted in awkward moments. A boss once told me that he hadn’t needed to hear so much information, just that I’d been out sick. A teacher avoided eye contact with me for two weeks in class.
Would they have been so uncomfortable if I’d been out with a case of mono?
Friends didn’t know how to react when they found out what was going on, and many of them fell away. Twice, my boyfriend and I broke up.
I screwed my eyes shut and tried, hard, not to think about what I’d written in my little blue notebook, what I felt about every relationship I had, even with my family.
I tried to not let my depression be right.
But there it was, in tiny lowercase letters squeezed between lines of messy writing.
I’ll push them away.
***
On June 24, 2015, I sank against the bathroom cabinet in my Pittsburgh apartment and let my body slump against the cold tile floor.
I was exhausted.
For days, I had seen nothing but black. I was taking two-hour lunch breaks in the middle of my job every day because I was constantly being triggered into debilitating panic attacks. I’d have to spend an hour in my bathroom every afternoon and wait for my breath to stop hitching on every inhale. Then I’d take a shower, wash all of the runny makeup off my face and begin again.
Sometimes I made it back to work. Sometimes I slipped back under my covers, fell asleep at 2 p.m. and told my boss I wasn’t coming back to the office.
It had been weeks of this pattern, and I was frustrated. I was angry with myself for not being able to beat this more quickly.
I was angry with my therapist for not fixing me faster. I was angry at the drugs I’d just started taking, because I had to wait six weeks for them to help me at all and I needed help now.
I dug my long fingernails across my forearms until the skin broke and breathed with the relief of transferring my mental hurt into physical pain. My depression was screaming at me again, telling me how worthless I was, how I’d never get better. And, like usual, I was listening.
The next day, I woke up sore, with my eyes swollen half-shut from crying. It took me too long to get out of bed, and I had to force myself to eat.
But I woke up.
***
When I stood on the Smithfield Street Bridge that day, I kept waiting for it to rain.
The clouds were dark, and it was the only conceivable way, in my mind, things could get even worse at that moment. It seemed appropriate.
But it didn’t rain. And my feet walked me away from the railing, following that path they’d memorized, over the bridge and through two traffic lights and around the corner and up the elevator to the fourth floor.
I didn’t feel good — not at all. But I was alive.
I’ve made it through 10 months since that day, and every hour still feels like an accomplishment. But every hour also feels like progress.
Dealing with depression and anxiety is a process that takes an immense amount of patience and a willingness to learn with an open mind. It will always be there, but my first serious encounter with depression happened within the inconvenient boundaries of my college career, and that’s the reality for thousands of other college students.
Now, I take two antidepressants and one anti-anxiety drug every day, and I don’t feel like they’re a crutch anymore. I exercise all the time for the natural high. I laugh. I smile with all of my teeth and both of my dimples, and most of the time, I mean it.
I pull myself off of my bathroom floor. I keep my nails cut short. I cross bridges. I go to class. I get through work.
But, most importantly: I wake up.
