It shouldn’t be brave to be vulnerable. It shouldn’t be brave to be able to to talk about who you are and how you arrived at being who you are. It shouldn’t be brave to tell the truth. Bravery: that’s for the people who pull people out of burning buildings, for the people who go out there to get shot at by the bad guys. It’s that simple: those people are brave.
It’s not brave of me to talk about the years I spent having depression. It’s not brave of me to talk about how it affected me, the bad and the good, the way that experience catalyzed a personal growth I probably wouldn’t have experienced otherwise. It’s not brave of me to talk about it now, nearly two years and what has felt like a lifetime since the first day I started to consider myself not depressed.
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It doesn’t ever feel brave to bring up a time of my life I never want to return to. It feels painful. It feels haunting.
Yet, that’s the one word I always heard whenever I talked about my experience: brave. “Brave” has never sit well with me. Maybe it’s my unwillingness to take compliments. Maybe it’s my disbelief that those compliments could be about me.
Brave? Me? When could I have ever been brave?
Maybe it’s my aversion to making things about me. Yet, here I am, writing about myself because I always found it the easiest thing to write about. I’ve just never asked to called brave. I’ve never asked to be pitied. There are and always will be people worse off than me, people braver than me.
Maybe it’s that I find it disingenuous.
I had this view that when you got depression, much like a physical illness, you either succumb to it or you beat it. If you beat it, there’s no need to worry about it afterwards. That’s how I wanted it to be like.
What I’ve come to realize since then is that it’s really more like a lingering cold. There’s a demonstrable difference in how I felt then and how I feel now. There isn’t that sick feeling in the back of my throat, no helpless feeling in the back of my head. Some days I’ll wake up with a persisting cough, a persisting anxiety of things to come, big or small. One day I might not be able to stop my nose from running, from thinking that maybe, just maybe, I am actually worthless.
It would be disingenuous for me to give the impression that my past doesn’t still affect me, that I don’t ever feel in danger of falling back into the tar pit, that someday I have to fight the instincts that would convince me to walk back into the darkness.
I used to wish it still didn’t occupy my thoughts as much as it still does. Maybe some will say that I let it, that I haven’t done enough to fight it back. To them, I say I have I tried. Maybe I could have tried more but I am tired. I’ve learned at a certain point there’s no point in fighting who you are, that there isn’t any point in picking scabs when all you need to heal is time. Sometimes, you just are who you are, for better and for worse.
As much as I wouldn't like this to be a part of who I am, ultimately it is a part of me, for worse and for better. Whatever doesn’t kill you, right?
I still have a lot of life left in me. Maybe that’s why I don’t like being called brave. Even if you can convince me what I’ve done is brave, that all shouldn’t matter. For all I’ve done, there is so much more to do.
When I do all there is to do, call me brave then.
