I don’t think I can pinpoint exactly when I realized that I was depressed.  I know that I struggled in high-school but it may have started before that.  You see middle school was…awkward for me.  I didn’t fit in, well, I wasn’t popular anyway.  And since middle school was the first time since 1st grade I’d been in public school I also was very bad at socializing.  Not to mention I didn’t dress like everyone else; my parents weren’t rich so they shopped at secondhand stores and my madre (God bless her, I love her for it now) wouldn’t let me dress like all the ‘popular’ girls, read immodestly.  Besides all that I was painfully shy; I was that little girl in your class who never talked and turned bright red every time the teacher even looked at her.  I was smart; I read several grade levels above everyone else and could’ve shined like the North Star in any and all English classes but I procrastinated and so never got above a C.  I had a few friends and I adored them but I knew that, socially speaking, I was at the bottom of the totem pole; I hung out with all the other freaks and geeks ;) .  Don’t get me wrong, looking back on all of it I wouldn’t have given up my friends for anything they were magnificent, but if I could go back in time and talk to the little awkward shy girl I was and show her that it was alright to be smart and stand out and be different, I would.  I despised middle school.  Not only was I shy and socially awkward but I faced discrimination.  Not because of my heritage but because of my padre’s job.  We lived in Nevada and he worked for the Forest Service.  It might not sound like a big deal but it caused a lot of trouble for us.  We were “asked to leave” restaurants AND churches, my brother got into a few fights over it and I had a friend stop talking to me because she found out.  People actually hated us.  I had a teacher spend at least half of every class telling us how evil the government (specifically the Forest Service) was, I sat listening to a preacher explain how the Forest Service was not in God’s plan for the government and I refused to read the local newspaper because it was so biased against the Forest Service.  Needless to say it was not an easy environment to grow up in, especially because I didn’t think there was anything wrong with what my padre was doing.  What could be wrong with a job that allowed you to help protect the natural world?  Anyway a few years later we moved to Colorado and I started high-school.  Once freshman year and once sophomore year I let myself dwell on the thought of suicide and when it happened sophomore year I decided that I’d had enough and went to talk to the school counselor.  She told my parents with my permission and my parents took me to a counselor.  I went for about a year and then decided, with my parents’ permission to discontinue going.  I still am not sure what brought my thoughts to those dark places all I know is that I was looking at the world and people around me and a voice kept telling me that they’d be happier without me; I saw that my presence was affecting change and I believed, wrongly, that the change I was affecting was bad or wrong somehow.  The whole time this was going on I was also dealing with, oh how to say it…betrayal is too strong a word and hurt doesn’t even begin to cover it – my family and I were having issues with the church we were currently involved in.  As previously mentioned I had experienced rejection from a few churches before due to my father’s job, but I’d never had anything like this happen.  I had invested myself in these people; they had gotten closer than anyone, outside of my family, had ever gotten to me.  I might post the creative writing piece I wrote about this hurt later, for now I don’t want to belabor the issue so let’s just say that they hurt me and I began to harden my heart towards God and “God’s people” for now, ok?  Junior and senior year passed without much difference between the two.  Senior year was probably the best year of high-school for me and it wasn’t just because I was about to be done.  Other than the fact that my two best friends spent most of the year fighting and I spent most of the year standing between them I had such a good time that if I were asked to do it all over again I would.  My classes went great, I slowly stopped caring what anyone thought of me or whether I was popular or not and I began to stand with greater confidence but behind it all I carried a pain deep inside and the worst part was I wore this mask, a thick hard mask to keep anyone from seeing the tears that drenched my soul.  I was hurting from the pain of being rejected from the people I had thought were wonderful and I was hurting from the effort of trying to be the ‘perfect’ Christian and I was hurting from the confusion of trying to figure out who I was and what I believed in.  The next part is difficult for me to talk about so it’ll have to wait for the next “installment.”

https://gothiquefae.wordpress.com/2008/05/22/my-struggle-with-depression-part-two/