Where My Feet Are
Tonight, I do the best I can to quiet the thoughts.
Topic: depression
Tonight, I do the best I can to quiet the thoughts.
Even if your body is rebelling against you, your mind is in chaos, and trauma has told you that you are too broken to be fixed—you make today better.
My point in telling you this story is to convey how I tried literally everything I could think of in order to rid myself of depression.
Every time I feel it, I panic. It comes swooping in, stormy and scary. It feels like I’m running from that rhino cloud in James and the Giant Peach.
It was how I survived. It’s what guided me out of that once endless maze; it’s the reason I’m still alive today.
Even when we don’t want to take another step. Even when our hearts hurt. Even when it feels like the phone never rings and no one cares, we are enough.
Years after that first day when I was eight—on a day just as bright and clear—the world once again plunged into a meaningless gray. Only this time, it didn’t lift.
I wanted to hear the candid account of someone in the middle, maybe just past the hardest days of this illness, but not quite to the happy ending where you’ve reached the place you never thought you would.
The good exists even if it’s small, silly, or invisible.
All the time spent thinking I was half-this and half-that and yet not enough of either, when in reality, I am a whole person whose identity is not half-anything.
The Harmaleighs, an indie/rock duo from Nashville, are set to release their sophomore album on August 2. The album is a conceptual work that centers around lead singer Haley’s challenges and triumphs with mental health.
I am more than a diagnosis, and I don’t have to pick between labels.
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