“There are three kinds of secrets. Something you hide at the bottom of your heart because you don’t want it mentioned. Something that you can’t say even if you want to. Something that you hope somebody asks about even though you’re hiding it.”

Over the past week I’ve recommenced watching anime after a couple of weeks off. That quote comes from Nabari no Ō (episode 10) and it very accurately describes the development of my depression.

For eleven years I pushed myself as hard as I could to hide from my depression. I punished myself to try and get some kind of response. I lost all my friends and grew distant from my family. I threw myself into all kinds of distractions to try and cover up the fact that I was empty inside. I didn’t see that it was a problem that I wanted to die. I hid it so well from everybody else that eventually I ended up hiding it from myself and I merged with my own depression.

At the start of this year something inside finally snapped. My depression came bubbling to the surface and wouldn’t go away. All my old distractions failed and I desperately searched for new ones. Ones that would push it back down again. I wanted to tell somebody what was going on, but I couldn’t. Because I couldn’t tell anybody I had to get rid of it some other way. This began to attract attention to myself and eventually my housemates and my family started to realise that something wasn’t right. I was highly resistant to getting help at first, but eventually I went along with it.

After all the ups and downs with medications, hospitalisation, suicide watch etc. I’ve finally worked my way up to the third type of secret. I still hate myself for not being able to do this alone, but I’m resigned to the fact that I can’t. I’m dying to talk to somebody, but I can’t initiate a conversation. Somehow I hate my family for not being able to see what was happening and there is no way I can talk to them. I don’t see a way to get past this third stage.

Housemate B has just left the house and now I’m on my own again. I think it’s time to implement the lesson learnt from Cowboy Bebop episode 11.

“Don’t leave food in the fridge”