This is How it Feels: Personal Accounts of Mental Illness

Dysthymia (@zellandia)

There are three of them: yellow and white, red, blue. Zoloft. Wellbutrin. I take them every night at dinner from a purple pillbox with the days of the week in English and Braille. They are my UN peacekeepers, mediating between me and this thing that I have. But sometimes they are my calvary coming over the hill.

Every day is a battle, and here's the thing: most of the time, we don't get into the nitty gritty. You hear about the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, not the grit in the trenches and the smell of musket smoke. We smile of the citizens and pretend like we're winning the war-but underneath the enemy is advancing.

Few people do dysthymia justice. It's not major depression, some say. The need for help isn't as emergent.

Which is true...to a degree. Think of major depression like shooting a bullet through a door. It's fast, it's brutal, and it tears right through. Now think of dysthymia as scraping at that same door with a steak knife. Minute by minute, the damage is less-but that doesn't mean you can't cut through. It just takes longer.

Dysthymia destroys. It is depression, after all.

I was twelve when it started. I'd just gone into grade 7 at a new school and everyone thought I was just entering into the moodiness so commonly attributed to adolescence. But I didn't get any better the more time passed. My grades suffered. At best, I was irritable-and I was rarely at best. Mostly I just thought about going to sleep.

When I think back to that time, all I can remember is sitting in English class, in the underbelly of the school beneath the gym. The room was perpetually dark-be it from the lack of functional lights or the near-obsidian walls. My teacher spent most days racisting all over us, and someone who was once my friend told me I'd never be able to get into university with my grades. For a year, I picked fights, and progressively gave up more and more, and I cried more days than I didn't

Then, inexplicably, I was okay. I fixed relationships with my friends and family. I rededicated myself to school and made Honour Roll. And when high school came around, I only got better.

For a year and a half I plateaued, but by shortly after my fifteenth birthday I was trundling down again.

Here I say this: I needed help. I should've gotten it years before I did, but I don't think so much about that anymore. What's important was that I did get it. And I remember the day clearly; my mother was driving me to school on a rainy morning and I told her, "I should see someone."

(I say should instead of need because I'm like my father that way: always trying not to come across as imposing.)

I saw my regular doctor and she gave me a list of referrals. After that, I ended up at a youth services centre talking to what were essentially guidance counsellors. (Not that they weren't lovely people, but I've never done well with my guidance counsellors.) Then it was off to the hospital to see a psychiatrist.

After a month, I got my diagnosis: dysthymia, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety, and OCD. They weren't individual threads, but rather a tangled mass of depression and dread and whatever else. I finally felt validated in those emotions, but other than that, it did little for me.

But the prescription that was written for me that day has worked its magic ever since.

A picture of me now: seventeen, pink-haired, prone to binge-watching Supernatural and being inexorably goofy, like putting oven mitts on and pretending I'm a crab. When I'm being serious, I'm a straight-A student, university-bound, published author, idolizer of Roméo Dallaire and fan of artsy movies such as Wings of Desire and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I'm not magically healed; my therapist used the term "in remission". I don't doubt I'll fall back into the pit one day, but at least I know I'm capable of hauling myself out.

So I take my Zoloft and my Wellbutrin every day with dinner. They're my peacekeepers, and my military when I need them to be.

It doesn't fix the damage, but it plugs the breach while I put the rest back together.