Notes: A Few Thoughts On Depression

This is kind of a personal essay.  It's not really funny or insightful.

At seventeen, I became very unhappy for reasons I didn't totally understand.

I was just finishing twelfth grade.  College promised a respite from all the mistakes I'd made in the past four years, particularly social ones.  I should have been looking forward to reinventing myself, and at some level I imagined that I was.  My parents, especially my mom, had found their tribes in freshman year - I pictured a tangle of young people piled onto a dorm room bed or huddled over papers; cramming, chatting away and falling asleep in the library.

People asked me if I was nervous, since it's so unusual for Canadian kids to travel away from home for school.  (Of my advanced placement class - full of people much brighter than me - of a hundred and ten, four left the country and only about fifteen went outside of BC.)  I said no, and I really think I meant it.  High school had become a thick, muggy column of air I had to push my way through.  I regularly fell asleep in class, and my teachers expressed concern about my 'home life'.  I laughed it off.  My home life is perfect.


When my parents organized a trip to Japan to visit my cousin Gay, however, I pled too much schoolwork and spent spring break locked in my room, sleeping through the day and emerging only to brew a fifth, sixth, seven pot of tea or to take another half-hour long shower.  I was accountable to no one, especially not myself.  But, I thought, it wasn't my fault.  It was high school's fault.  As soon as I escaped its toxic fumes I would emerge triumphant as the fun, intelligent person I knew college would extract from me.