One Leap Forward, Ten Steps Back

How living with my parents in my late twenties saved my life

*TRIGGER WARNING: suicide, depression, self-harm

No one knows the full unfiltered story. There are a trusted few who know a great deal of it. My psychotherapist has heard most of it. But no one really knows it all- myself included. I’ve not yet confronted some of the darkest parts of my story. I sometimes convince myself that things happened a certain way or that some of the choices I made were in my control. I’ve buried the most embarrassing, raw moments. Today, I’m going to do my best to tell my honest, true story. I think I’m ready.

My story by no means begins with my first move to LA. Obviously a great deal happened before the age of 24. However, since my current move to LA is what inspired me to write this- it makes sense that I start around there. I’ve dreamt of living in California since watching Laguna Beach in 6th grade (you’re lying if you’re my age and didn’t have similar thoughts). The dream became more concrete when I realized I wanted to write movies or tv. After taking the screenwriting class in high school, I saw only one path for myself. Eventually a friend of mine also expressed her desire to move out west. So we both agreed we would move there after graduating from our PA colleges. The idea wasn’t too far-fetched for me. My parents moved to LA after they graduated. Their plan was to stay a year- they ended up staying five. My older sister, who was born during my parents' time in Cali, also had interest in moving there. We both went on trips to the westside with my dad at some point during our college careers. He took us each to the Paramount lot where he once worked and hoped to break into the business. My sister and I, already on the path to work in film (if you count getting a degree in the subject), grew more fond of the California dream after seeing it through our father’s eyes.

The post college move was already behind schedule. I transferred colleges after a couple of years, so I had to do a bonus lap. That’s only half of the truth, though. The main reason I wasn’t on track to finish my credits in time was due to fighting my mental illnesses throughout those years. When I went to my first college, the diseases I’ve been dealing with since the age of 10 came at me in full force. Despite being on medication and going to therapy, I experienced a multitude of low points. My depression episodes, that I’ve had on and off for a couple of decades, started feeling less like episodes and more like a movie with too many sequels. I was going to therapy but I was half-assing it. I chose to ignore triggers and signs of depression in favor of feeling normal and getting the “college experience”. Instead of being open with friends, family, and professors about what I was going through, I avoided it. I told myself I was being lazy and it would pass if I tried harder. That only made the disease grow into a bigger monster. It got to a point where I only went to my film classes and after just one semester, I took a leave of absence. Somehow I managed to still live at the dorms during this time and work on campus. Again, avoidance in favor of feeling like I was doing everything my friends were doing. I should have gone home to get better. I should have taken a step back.

Even before all of this, I should have taken a step back. My depression got so bad my senior year of high school that I was absent for a total of at least 30 days. But I was good at school, I was supposed to go to college, this was the timeline. I craved that intangible reward of an “A”. The intrinsic motivation many of us have to learn (I genuinely love learning, reading, etc.) becomes a forced sport. I’ll never forget teachers telling us in elementary school that how we did on our standardized tests would affect the price of our parent’s home.

It’s drilled into your head that you must get the best grades OR ELSE- you won’t get into a good college, which means you won’t get a good job, which means you’ll be poor working at a fast food restaurant and die alone. So when I got slightly better, I followed that timeline. I thought perhaps going to college would solve all of my problems, that leaving home was what I needed. At that age the social norms are so prevalent and overwhelming.

My psychotherapist once said depression is such an awful disease because it infects you, while convincing you that your personality, your actions, your being is the cause of the infection. People still don’t see depression as a disease. They see it as a choice, negativity, being overly emotional. The truth is, depression is the opposite of feeling anything at all. You’re numb. You’re not yourself. Your brain is not functioning the way it’s supposed to, the chemicals are out of whack. If you have clinical depression, there’s not some big terrible event that needs to happen in order for you to fall down the hole. You get pushed in by a disease that you have no control over; by a physical, chemical imbalance. With all of my growth I still have trouble reminding myself of this. It’s so hard for humans to grasp the intangible; a fracture that doesn’t show up on an X-ray, a deep pain that you can’t discover with a blood test. When I took a leave freshman year of college I didn’t consider myself sick, I considered myself a failure.

You'll start to notice a theme here, which I promise will lead to a point. That theme is society’s timeline and for some reason feeling the need to take tremendous strides in your early 20s. I wasn’t going to let my semester off affect me- perhaps I just wasn’t at the right school. My film classes were aced, so I guess that’s where I needed to put my focus. But at my current school I couldn’t start screenwriting classes until my junior year. So I hunted for a change. I googled screenwriting majors in my area, started applying to transfer, and got into an art school. And I will say- I believe some of the changes helped lessen my anxiety triggers. Being able to focus on my passion, in small classes and a creative environment was amazing. I think when applying to colleges there’s so much focus on how it looks to other people and how it will lead to a career. You’re pressured into deciding on “your path” so early on. Even though I'm one of the few who had a sense of what I wanted to do, that pressure is felt in every college building. There’s some unspoken rule that this is the start of your life, that you can’t take a step back or slow down. Although my depression took a back seat I still dealt with my insomnia and anxiety- as many do in school, which should be a sign something has to change with our education system. But I had nearly a 4.0, a good social life, and felt happy. So I went to therapy less, I went down on my med dosage, and California was still in sight.

The thing with depression is that you can’t stop going to therapy even when you feel better. If you have severe clinical depression and generalized anxiety (and a few other diagnoses I won’t get into for purposes of length) you’ll probably need to be medicated for life. Like a diabetes patient needs insulin. Unfortunately, there’s such a deep stigma about SSRIs. I still constantly question the pills I put into my body. And during my fifth year of college, I was still grappling with whether I had a disease. So of course I stopped therapy because I was doing everything “right”. (millennials grew up with a stigma of therapy too- for 20 years I was the only person I knew in therapy aside from my mom’s friends). So when I started to feel those early signs of an episode, I refused to acknowledge them. I would not let my brain ruin the path I was on. I leapt forward instead of pausing, which led to me laying in my bed one day, blood running down my wrists, willing myself to reach for the phone and call my mom for help.

I’ve had a history of self harm since high school, and although that was the most I ever cut up until that moment, it was not deep enough to warrant a hospital trip. I was not intending to kill myself. I was just desperate to feel something and to punish myself for letting the disease catch up with me again. I had been numb and heavy for days by then. (When you have depression you feel physically heavy, like slomo). I hadn’t been eating, I could barely get out of bed. There was a moment when it was just me and my razor blade, that I felt anger and sadness. The feelings, although “negative”, allowed me to snap out of numbness and dial my phone. My mom picked me up, took me home, and scheduled an appointment with a new psychotherapist for that week. I didn’t know it then, but that was the end of my college career. Only a few people know that I never graduated.

I still have trouble admitting I don’t have a degree. And I also know there are a couple friends who look down on me for it.

That first appointment with my new psychotherapist I’ll never forget. She still remembers it too- references that from the moment I walked in she could see the disease cast over me. I had no expression on my face. I felt like a zombie and apparently also looked like one. There are many essays I’ve written and wish to share that delve into what a depression episode entails because it’s often misunderstood. I’ll keep things simple here, however. There’s an arduous process of finding out what medication best suits you, also finding a therapist that best suits you- I happened to get extremely lucky with this new therapist (I’ve gone through many in the past: one session stands, a few sessions, a long relationship, ghosting).

Once you find the medication cocktail that best suits you, there is the weeks process of it changing your brain chemistry. Even with medication there’s a natural cycle to an episode. If you let it get as bad as I have a couple of times, there’s weeks where getting out of bed is a success story. It feels impossible to eat or even watch tv. Talking to another person is like a workout. You sleep a lot. You isolate as much as possible. There are moments where your brain feels empty, there are moments where your brain is filled with the darkest of thoughts. You’re convinced you’re not meant to be here. As much as people tell you it will pass, as many times as you’ve experienced it passing, there feels like no end. Except for the end. Deep in the trenches, considering suicide doesn’t necessarily seem like a sad thing, it just seems like a realistic, eventual cause of death. There are so many notes in my phone that simply say “I don’t think I’ll make it past *insert age*.”

When you make it through the worst of the phase, there are small steps forward. I know I’m privileged because of the medical care I’m able to receive thanks to my parents. They pay for my therapy (it’s so difficult to find someone in your insurance), they pick up my meds when I can’t get out of bed, they do their best to understand what I’m going through and to help. If I didn’t have these privileges I wouldn’t be here today. Something needs to change so that everyone can have access to these things. My medication and my weekly therapy appointments; being able to pause and not work, gave me the time I needed for those small steps to turn into big ones. It often starts with it getting easier to wake up and stand, to do things like read, watch tv, socialize, eat. It takes a little longer to get to a place where you’re working, exercising, cooking for yourself, doing productive “adult things”. I eventually got out on the other end, I moved back to the city and got a job as a nanny. But…

I wasn’t proud of myself for getting to a better place. I was mad at myself. I thought “I took all of these steps backwards, I need to make up for lost time. I must get back to the timeline.” So just a few months after getting back to myself, I made the move to LA. I was better, yes. But I needed more time to recover. I still had so much to learn in regards to dealing with my mental illnesses, I had found a psychotherapist I actually clicked with, and had a great support team. The pressure I put on myself outweighed it all, though. I even felt pings of an episode returning but, once again, I assumed a big change would solve my problems. Being 24 and lost is hard, but add in a move across the country with no job or apartment or plan- it was a recipe for disaster. And about two months in I found myself alone with a razor again. Except this time I had to be rushed to the hospital for stitches. This time, I found myself the closest I’ve ever been to thinking about the end. The lowest point came a couple days after the stitches. I remember walking aimlessly and stopping in an alleyway, not seeing anything around me. Feeling absolutely and utterly hopeless.

I forced myself to finish out my year in Venice. There were so many unforgettable moments and I did end up falling in love with the West Coast, it just wasn’t my time yet. I found a psychiatrist and therapist- neither were a match for me but I stuck with them for the time. The one good thing my LA psychiatrist suggested was getting a DNA test done to see how I metabolize SSRIs. This is how I discovered that the meds I took in high school and college metabolized so fast that it was basically as if I was taking a sugar pill. And the medication I was currently on was only providing half of the dose. So I switched to a medication where I would get the full dose. It made me throw up almost every night. With about three months left of my time there, I was having panic attacks and puking nearly every day. My psychiatrist forgot my name every time we met, and I was feeling so worn out that I didn’t want to try out other medications.

When I told my friends I was moving home I said it was for money reasons (half of the truth) and that I just needed a year home before I could move back out again (I actually convinced myself of this one). No one knew that I had experienced my most suicidal thoughts yet; no one knew I was coming home to save myself.

Returning to my old psychotherapist helped a great deal. We figured out the med situation, but there were still many other issues to cover. I went to intensive CBT therapy for 12 weeks and I worked on taking small steps no matter how badly I wanted to sprint forward to “a real adult life like my peers”. There were many moderate episodes in my first year home that lasted a month or so. It was still taking me longer than it should to admit to myself and others when I felt an episode coming on. I still was doing a lot of avoidance and isolating at times. There came a point where I knew it would take me longer than a year to figure it out. I was getting (slightly) better at realizing how much work needed to be done to be able to fight my disease. There was no shortage of jokes on my end about living with my parents in the second half of my 20s. I love a dark and self-deprecating joke, but I’m also aware that it came from a place of deep embarrassment. The timeline is still something I struggle with in current therapy appointments. I’d be lying if I didn’t say part of me still feels the need to play catch up.

About a year and a half home I felt like I had the tools to put up a good fight against my depression. I knew my triggers, I knew what to do when I felt an episode coming on, I recovered (well in remission, depression is an ongoing disease). Then COVID hit. COVID moved back my plans to return to LA. And while I do think being forced to stay an extra couple of years helped me immensely, saying the full-time at home is what I needed would just be a way to make myself feel better.

But everyone was put on pause for COVID. It was during that first pandemic year + a little that I think I made the most strides in getting a hold of my issues. Something about the world being on pause allowed me to feel less bad about my own life being on pause. It was during this time- with my therapy, self-care, habit forming, etc. that I not only developed more tools to put up a good fight against my depression, but the confidence to win. I’ve been tested since then. Because no matter the work I do, it’s a cyclical disease.

I can’t help when my brain hits that funk and it will happen for the rest of my life. In the last year, however, I’ve only had mini episodes. I tell people around me when I feel off (which is huge for me), I make a therapy appointment, I let myself pause or take “steps backward” in order to get through. If I had taken steps backward in the past- taking a year off before college, postponing my move, simply taking time for therapy, then I probably wouldn’t be living at home at the age of 29. This is not to say I regret what led me here. Lessons are learned the hard way.

I’m not suggesting we all need to suffer living with our parents at this age in order to learn about ourselves. What I do want to say is that it’s okay to pause. It’s okay to not feel like you’re where you should be because that’s a bunch of bullshit. My psychiatrist often reminds me that the one week I might take being unproductive to thwart a possible episode is so much better than ignoring it and eventually losing a year to a spiral. We don’t have to constantly be making these major leaps. It’s been five years of living in the home I grew up in- twice. I’m moving this Saturday. Even with feeling confident, I’m not pressuring myself to figure it all out right away. If life is about being happy then FUCK THE TIMELINE. Don’t let the stigma of things keep you from doing what you need to do to survive. One upside of depression is that when you come out of the ditch those moments of happiness and feeling are so powerful. You were in the dark for so long that the light is almost blinding- in the best way. I promise wherever you are, wherever you live, no matter what job you have or what you’re majoring in, if you see that light then you’re doing something right. Do what you need to do to hold onto it.