Getting Through and Going Back
I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop on a sunny day in Los Angeles, working remotely for the best job I’ve ever had. I was even thinking about how I haven’t been this happy and healthy in years. I listen to music while I work and suddenly, without queuing or expecting it, a song came on that knocked the wind out of me. It was a song I used to listen to every day when I was depressed. There’s really a whole playlist of them that I have long since buried, but somehow this one song hid in the depths of my music library. I hadn’t listened to it since I was seventeen and driving around aimlessly on particularly sad nights. When it came on randomly the other day, I was right back there — seventeen, in my dad’s old car.
For a very long time I thought I’d be depressed forever. I couldn’t imagine a time when I would exist in my body and not be miserable. I couldn’t imagine thinking thoughts in a normal manner. That’s one of the scariest parts: believing you’ll never get better. No matter what anyone tells you about the contrary, you can’t fathom it.
Alas, it is true. For me. And I think it’s quite possible for most people.
At the wise age of twenty-three, I see my life thus far in three parts. A joyful childhood. A cloudy adolescence. Then, this sparkling young-adulthood. I often refer to the ages fourteen through twenty as my fuzzy years and, as a result of coming out of them, everything is startling clear. It is both overwhelming and awesome. It’s very similar to going twelve years of my life without glasses (even though I needed them) and, when I finally got them, being so blown away by seeing leaves on trees and words on road signs. Depression is like being visually impaired. Now I can see 20/20.
Many of my friends in high school were depressed too. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a teenager not a little bit depressed these days. It’s a puberty thing, a high school thing, a being stuck under your parents’ roof thing. But what’s so beautiful about this young-adulthood we’re in is that many of my friends are coming out of it too. Whether it is because we got the help we needed or because something chemically changed inside us, we have a new lease on life.
I’ve always known that our brains aren’t fully developed until twenty-five, but I never knew exactly what that would feel like. Though I’m not quite twenty-five, I think I’m starting to experience it. Things are slowing down, becoming more clear, finally making sense. In this article called “The Neuroscience of 20-Somethings,” they explain how much work the adolescent brain is doing — firing off electrical impulses like crazy and trying desperately to solidify thought patterns. When I was seventeen, it felt like my thoughts were going a million miles a minute and they actually were. My brain is now in its final developmental stretch. To quote the article: “‘In the twenties, the brain is definitely still changing, but it's not rampant biological change…Most of the brain's systems are good to go in one's twenties.’”
None of this is groundbreaking information, but the way it feels is groundbreaking to me. A few months ago, when I settled into this new life of mine, a quiet descended upon me. It unnerved me. Quietude, in my history, always equaled hollowness, and hollowness was a tell-tale sign of my depression. The first thought that crossed my mind was, “Am I depressed again?,” which is often my first thought. Though I’m miles away from my seventeen-year-old self, I’m still waiting for depression to sneak back up on me. If it did, I would know how to deal with it this time — it would just be majorly inconvenient. So, I was expecting it. I sat with this new quietude to see if it felt like the familiar hollowness. It didn’t. It was something I’ve never felt before. Contentedness.
I’m living under my own roof, my body isn’t rampantly changing, and the thoughts in my head have slowed to a manageable speed. Sometimes, on a good day, there aren’t any thoughts in there at all. That is a beautiful thing. We’re not talking about it enough. It doesn’t happen to everyone in their twenties or for the exact reasons that it happened to me. It might even take a little longer or require a different approach, but it is absolutely worth waiting and working for. Our bodies are built to help us along.
Contentedness is a strange and wonderful feeling. I’m looking forward to it becoming familiar.
Songs That, If They Come on Randomly in Ten Years, I Hope Remind Me of Being 23:
“Walking on Broken Glass” – Annie Lennox
“Learning to Fly” – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
“Change of Seasons” – Sweet Thing
“Light of Clear Blue Morning” – Dolly Parton