to be loved is to be Known (study abroad can’t fix your problems)

I’ve been here for almost three weeks. Everything is different, but everything is the same. Just not in the ways I wanted them to be.

I think I’m depressed. Not the kind of ‘oh I’m just going through a tough time, but I’ll feel better soon’, but in the ‘I think I actually have depression’ kind of way. I keep finding myself getting frustrated with others when they say they’re also depressed, because, like, I have been feeling like this for literally as long as I can remember. Even throughout my childhood, when everyone around me said I was the most cheerful, positive person, I slowly started to feel like it was an insult. Apparently, my brain also thought that, because I soon prided myself on being the single most cynical person alive.

It became a personal mission to not be the thing that everyone expected me to be. I just had to be different. My friends in elementary school would like a band, and I had to say I disliked them just to be different, even if I actually did like them (yes, I did in fact destroy my own opportunity to enjoy one direction like a normal girl in 2014). I think as a child, I always had a hope that somehow things would all work out, and that translated to me being ‘so positive and cheerful!’ which I absolutely hated. In retrospect, I hated it so much because to me that meant that I couldn’t ever be upset. To me it meant that if I ever was, it wouldn’t be taken seriously because there would be the assumption that I would quickly find the good in the situation and get over it, like a weird, fucked-up Pollyanna situation. I loved the things that were considered ‘dark’, I had an intense obsession with medieval torture devices, the Salem Witch Trials, and horror video games. If you knew me as a kid, or saw a picture of me, this would make a lot of people very surprised. When I thought of the word depression, I assumed it was someone who just got sad sometimes. I never considered how accurately a word could describe me.

As I got older, I found new terms that felt even more accurate, and in May of 2021, I got diagnosed with the big 3 (or triple threat as I so lovingly call it) of mental illnesses: ADHD, OCD, and Anxiety. I try and use other mental illness terms as loosely as possible because I don’t want to be one of those people who is constantly self-diagnosing, but I do think there is something to be said about understanding your brain and knowing that something is wrong. In this case, apparently even morewrong. It would take another 300 pages if I were to only go in depth about the Triple ThreatTM, (and I’d run out of good writing material if I give it away too soon), so instead I’ll do what I do best: overanalyze my every thought and beat a very dead horse.

I get these moments sometimes where I feel overwhelmed at the idea of doing any simple thing. It’s like someone puts a cement box around me and I am physically incapable of finding the door. The walls keep getting closer to me and my whole body feels like it could snap because of the tension I carry within it. It feels different from a panic attack, where I can’t breathe and I feel like I’m going to die. This is a different kind of death completely. Instead, it’s as if I am isolated from the rest if the world and I become completely invisible. I want to disappear into the ground where no one can find me, because the idea of having to interact with the world sounds like a punishment. I make myself get up and do basic self-care. I go to my classes. I do my work for my job. It becomes meaningless, like there is no real end in sight to what I’m doing, and therefore there isn’t a point in doing any of it. I still do everything though; I’m not a quitter. I always tell myself that there must be some sort of reason for everything, that this is a temporary feeling and there are so many things in my life that are incredible, so I need to focus on the good. I mean, I’m in Sweden right now. Sweden. Like. Hello?? I am literally living my childhood dream. Younger me would be so proud. Can’t that be enough?

I am never satisfied. I don’t think I ever will be. Every single thing that I do, every single accomplishment, feels like nothing. I feel incompetent every single day, and no amount of academic or verbal validation seems to help. I still melt under the praise, but it feels fake, like it’s meant for someone who actually earned it. I don’t think I’ve ever deserved something that I’ve earned. I try to remind myself that I have earned this. But I am an imposter in my own home. Everything feels like it belongs to someone else and yet I still want more. I’m like a leech. Even writing this I ask myself, why would anyone read this? Writing has become my own personal diary, this blog being my own shield for everything I have wanted to say about myself but was too afraid to say out loud. So. Welcome to my diary, I guess.

I’m treading a fine line between thinking I am the coolest person alive and also wanting to never be perceived in the public eye again. I like to blame everything I feel on the fact that I am perpetually tired, that once I get a good sleep schedule, I’ll be fine again. But even with a good sleep schedule, this feeling always comes back. I’ve been relating to Ilya Rozanov a lot recently, his brash, confident energy that masks his depression. When I read The Long Game, I fell in love with him even more. To have a character like that, someone who is so confident, so consumed by his job, not letting anything stop him from playing, even when he doesn’t want to, that made me realize that depression can look like so many different things. That maybe, even with everything else I have, they might not cover all of the bases. Maybe, there is something else that can explain this. That’s the constant search: Why am I the way that I am?

My first tattoo I ever got is one of my favorite quotes from the Norwegian TV series Skam, “minut för minut” (translated to Swedish because that’s the language I actually speak) meaning “minute by minute”. I try to remember this like a lifeline to ground me to reality, to stay in the present moment without allowing myself to spiral into all of the ‘what ifs’. I mean, there’s a reason I got it literally etched into my skin permanently. The last tattoo I got was for the same reminder, the title of my favorite episode of Euphoria, “trouble don’t last always”. Not only does that episode fully encapsulate me as a person (get ready for that long ass essay that I will inevitably write), but it reminds me that there can be good at the end of everything. This can’t all be for nothing. Everything that I have been doing for the past 19 years of being alive cannot have led me here if it wasn’t supposed to mean something. If it wasn’t supposed to help me in some way. It doesn’t seem comforting enough though, just a temporary solution to a more permanent problem. And isn’t that just cruel? To be born with incorrect wiring that makes me a thought-daughter with a never-ending dread for life and a yearning to be known?

I still haven’t figured out anything about myself. Sure, I had a less-than-stelar childhood, but it was overflowing with love for me, so that trauma should cancel itself out. I spent years on the internet, researching mental illnesses like a psychologist, trying to understand anything and everything about my potential mental flaws. To be loved is to be known, so maybe that is why I haven’t loved myself yet. I will never be able to fully know myself, and no one else will either, one of the most excruciating things about being a human being. It’s almost week three of studying abroad, and I have yet to discover a world-changing revelation about myself and how to heal my brain from its own self sabotage, but I’m trying. I suppose that’s all that I can do.