At twenty-two years old, I have been knowingly living with depression for six, going on seven years now, though if you count the time I have unknowingly lived with depression, it's going on about eight. When I was about sixteen years old I was diagnosed with depression, I started seeing a therapist, and trying different medications until my doctor and I found one that we thought would work. In these six or seven years I've been battling depression, I've bounced back and forth between needing therapy and thinking I don't need therapy, taking my medications steadily, thinking I no longer needed them, and not taking them everyday because sometimes I just never cared enough.

Depression is a constant battle, though for a very long time I thought with a little bit of treatment, and a couple weeks of feeling a bit better, I was cured, like a cold or the flu. Take a little medicine until it goes away and you're all better. Eventually I learned this is not the case. As with many mental illnesses, or with a chronic physical illness, one must always work to manage the symptoms, they don't necessarily just 'go away', at least for me they didn't. Due to the way I treated my depression, and the way I let the social stigma of mental illness sway my view of the way I should go about treatment, these past few years have been full of extreme highs and extreme lows, though as I progressed and still yo-yoed with my treatments, my depression became less extreme on one end or another. My depression became an everyday normality for me.

After living with depression for so long, it becomes less of a constant feeling of sadness, it becomes less of the highs and lows and eventually is just there. It turns into exhaustion, it becomes numbing, and gets to the point where you don't see it as an issue, it's no longer an illness, it simply becomes who you are. It makes each day a bit more difficult to climb out of bed unless there is an immediate reason to do so, and each evening it makes it easier and easier to climb right back into that bed and ignore any obligations you may have. It keeps you exhausted and tired, no matter how much you may sleep, even when you sleep days away. Living with depression for so many years and allowing it to swallow you whole turns the illness into something you may not even recognize anymore, and that's what I realized this year. I let my depression become who I am, I have let it define me. I've turned myself and my depression into the punchlines for countless jokes, I've described myself by my illness and the symptoms for so long, gradually allowing it to happen more and more each day that I have completely lost myself in this constantly rolling storm. I completely stopped recognizing my symptoms as symptoms and instead recognized my symptoms as me. This is what living with depression, and letting it go consistently treated and untreated does.

This is the person I have found myself to be at the end of this year, for longer than I probably even know I have not been myself, I have been my depression, and the absolute best thing that has happened to me in this insanely tumultuous year is recognizing my symptoms again, and realizing underneath these dark clouds and this clinical diagnoses that I am still a very real person, I am still myself, I am not my depression, and in this new year to come I will be able to no longer say I am depressed but rather I have depression. And realizing that you, in fact, still are yourself underneath all the sadness and exhaustion is the greatest step to finally caring enough to follow through and find the help you deserve.