I thought I'd elaborate more on what's been going on with me. After reading a book about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I started wondering if it was what I've fallen victim to. Reading about the symptoms made me start to probe into my fears and insecurities causing me to burst into tears in the middle of a bookstore.
I'm 23 years old. In July of 2000, my family was moving from Atlanta, Ga to Raleigh, NC. It was the summer between 7th and 8th grade. On the way up my father was crushed by our UHaul truck when he accidentally left the emergency brake up, but he survived after 5 weeks of intensive care. I resumed 8th grade back in Atlanta for a few weeks until my parents figured out how to get back to moving following the accident. I seemed fine until we got to NC.
I had been heavy to computers since I was about 7 or 8, because my father was a computer programmer and I was exposed to them early on, so it provoked my geekiness. I had spent the few weeks using my computer before we actually moved to NC, and then we got into our new apartment. I had my computer setup, and I tried going back to school, but it just seemed horrible to me. I just didn't feel I had the energy to make it through a new school. The school was more old-fashioned than the one I was used to and I started trying to get out of it because it just seemed to be too much for me.
After a while of trying to get out of school, I ended up not going at all, and I began staying in my room constantly using my computer playing games online. I never left the house and never wanted to. The games made me feel content and I desired nothing more. So, I quit school in 8th grade and my parents became concerned that I wasn't participating in life anymore, and I began seeing psychiatrists and therapists. I didn't exercise at all and started putting on weight. After a while, I was diagnosed with major depression and went up to 80mg of Paxil a day.
I tried home-schooling, a normal high school, a charter school, but I just didn't want to go to school. I just wanted to sit at my computer all day. I started thinking my parents didn't care about me and they were trying to hurt me emotionally or trick me. I tried running away at one point, but they came after me. I became a diabetic because of the weight gain, and I had gotten up to over 325 lbs. I was 225 when I was in 7th grade. My parents tried getting me to get a job and I tried 2 fast food jobs, but I couldn't hold them out of a lack of interest. Eventually, in 2005, I was able to get a job at a fast food restaurant and started working there, holding it longer than the others.
Around this point, I was tapered off of the Paxil, with the doctor thinking I no longer needed it. I got down to 300 lbs after working there for a year. All I did at that point was play games on my computer and go to work. In late 2006, at 300 lbs, my doctor told me I had to get a grip on my weight or I was being put on Insulin. At this point, my mother showed me weight watchers and I began using it to lose weight. Around this time also, I was slowly weening myself off of my computer, taking myself away from my games and doing things on my computer that wasn't an MMORPG like World of Warcraft.
By January 2007, I had reached the point where World of Warcraft was getting boring for me, and I no longer had an interest in playing it. It was 5 days after the newest expansion came out. I stopped and told myself, "it's time to start fixing the problems my depression caused." So, I started hanging out with my family more, exploring Raleigh where I had moved to that I had never explored, and keeping on losing weight. I tried homeschooling again to get my high school diploma, but realizing it would take too long, I opted for a GED so I could start at the community college.
I began telling myself that I had a lot of things I had to be fixing and that I had to spend a lot of time learning the things about life I didn't get to because of the time I spent in my room. During 2007, I had breakdowns constantly. I felt like 6 years of my life had passed by and I was 20 years old, incomparable to other people my age. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing with my life and I cried constantly. I felt like my family just didn't understand the agony I was feeling trying to understand that time I had lost.
During this time, I had no idea how to figure out what meant I wasn't in a depression. It had taken over so much of my life and thrown me off course so much that I felt like I had done something wrong when all I was trying to do was be myself. I thought, is there a requirement on how much time I have to spent outside of the house to say I'm not in a depression? Do I have to be exercising all the time? Is there a quota on socializing? All I wanted to do was be myself, but I felt like I didn't know how, and I tried to create these artificial rules to avoid the depression. So, I kept trying to just be more....outgoing and active. I still used my computer everyday, but not as much as before.
The breakdowns became less frequent through 2007 as I began working on work, school, family. I started convincing myself, "Ok, maybe to not be in a depression, I have to be constantly seeking out new things to do, to keep myself pushing forward to make it look like my life is making progress. That makes sense." I went with that but it took a lot of conscious effort and became draining. Personal hobbies, such as computer games, or music, or movies, I was familiar with that gave me energy I became afraid of because they weren't part of seeking new things to do. I thought, "These old things make me feel like I'm falling back into a depression."
I kept myself from doing things like watching movies I enjoyed because they weren't new things to do. I kept myself from playing role playing games that I needed to feel like myself out of a fear of becoming stuck in my room and isolated from the world. Areas where I used to live reminded me of the time I spent in my depression and made me feel like it was happening again. My favorite songs from those years reminded me of it and made me feel it was happening again. I started becoming afraid of a lot of things that were associated with my depression because it was so horrible, something that had messed up my life so much.
I felt like I no longer had personal hobbies to take pride in, I became obsessed with school and overly critical of myself, concentrating on my failures. I had gotten down to 200 lbs, and I felt like I didn't deserve to be that weight, because it was caused by my depression, something that wasn't....natural. I became obsessed with finding relationships, because I felt like it was the only way to feel truly entertained. I ran into the problem that it was like I had no personal identity to offer to the relationship and I failed at finding dates. I started feeling hopeless in terms of finding a girlfriend and thus, lonely.
School became the only thing outside of my full time job at a department store that I kept focusing on and tried using as something to define myself. I thought I'd go into Accounting, but during my first semester, I went into a computer lab for one of my classes and noticed an opened computer in the back. Suddenly, I felt a flood of memories of how much computers meant to me, and I felt like I was lying to myself by going into accounting. I spent the rest of the day confused and crying. I was trying to take 4 classes and work full-time, but with this personal problem coming back to haunt me, I broke down and had to drop 2 classes. I sorted it out the best I could and decided to take classes in accounting, psychology and computers in the following semester to make a decision on a major to pursue.
I just kept moving on, but I had started to feel like it was impossible to stand still and focus on myself. I felt like I had this invisible dependence on being around other people. I felt agitated if I tried thinking while sitting alone. My breakdowns that started in early 2007 had slowed down at this point from once a week to about once every few months. I had made myself stop doing a lot of things I wanted to do out of fear or telling myself it wasn't something new, and I started feeling bored all day. The breakdowns of, "I just can't take this confusion and overanalyzing anymore" started happening about 6 months ago, increasing with frequency until I went on a date with a girl that made me realize that I was insecure and had to focus on fixing my depression issue.
I started a therapist and taking Paxil a month ago. The Paxil made me feel happy in general about half the time, but because of sexual side effects, I switched to Effexor a week ago. The therapist didn't work with me and I have switched to another one for the last 2 weeks. I just feel bored, anxious, overly-critical, restless, on guard all the time, depressed and lonely. I'm starting to feel hopeless but I dropped out of school yesterday to de-stress my life to focus on fixing this problem. I'm just not sure what is going on. I'm also really worried about my weight because I feel like I've been craving a lot more the last month and eating out of boredom or stress.
