Chapter 12- The Backpack

Jay Z, music mogul, rap artist, on therapy: “I grew so much from the experience. But I think the most important thing I got is that everything is connected. Every emotion is connected and it comes from somewhere. And just being aware of it.”

After the initial introductions, Michelle asked me to list all of the things in my life that were stressing me out. At first, it seemed like an overwhelming task, until she broke it down a different way for me. She told me to imagine that my life was like a backpack, and all the stressors were each individual items, like bricks, being added to the backpack, making it heavier. She explained that when I experienced my breakdown, the backpack had gotten too heavy for me to carry, any longer.

When she asked me list what the "bricks" in my backpack were, it became easier for me to identify, and separate my stressors. For so long I had gotten so used to being sad, that I hadn’t really given much thought about the actual problems that were causing the sadness in the first place. To my surprise, what was transpiring during my first therapy appointment was completely different than what I’d imagined. I thought my mom would be doing all the talking but instead, she sat back and observed, as I started to take some of these bricks out of this imaginary backpack. One after the other I would list something that was troubling me and we would go over each topic a little bit. We analyzed each issue and sorted them out based on a few different categories.

We began by categorizing the stressors by level of severity. We wanted to figure out what the core issues were, and which were the most troubling, so that we could attack the most severe, first. Next, we sorted them by which of the stressors were easiest to fix. Some things that were depressing me, like having to grieve over lost loved ones, were harder than others to recover from. Those were the things we knew would need to do more in depth work, to come to terms with. Some other things that were causing me a great deal of stress were a little bit easier to solve, like financial issues, relationship issues, and some of my post-traumatic stress, from various events that transpired over the years.

For the first time in months, I was starting to clear my mind and I could feel my anxiety level decreasing, in that moment. All at once, I was letting everything out, I was putting it all out there for her to receive, it was weird, but it was working. There was never a feeling of discomfort while I was there, I felt comfortable sharing my most personal fears, problems and challenges with someone who I’d just met, but somehow, felt really understood me. Another thing that was reassuring about therapy, that Michelle made clear from the beginning, was that everything I expressed during our sessions would be 100% confidential. Even from my mother, if I chose. Knowing that I could say anything I wanted about anything that was going on in my life, and it wouldn’t get back to anybody, allowed me to genuinely open up to my therapist without holding back.

Even with someone you really trust, it can be hard to share your deepest feelings, because everyone has that one other person they tell everything to, so trusting someone to keep your secrets isn’t easy. Besides, there is always the fear that you are being judged. Knowing that nothing I said to Michelle would get out, I felt comfortable letting go of, literally, everything. I went into deep thought about all the things in my life that were bringing me down, and I let them out for my mom and my therapist to take in. I had so many things weighing on my mind, that it felt impossible to sort them out when I was alone, but now in therapy, sorting those things out was much easier. Not only was I sharing stressors out loud that allowed my mom and Michelle to understand me better, but I started understanding myself better.

Being twenty-one is stressful as it is, add in depression and anxiety, and we have a much bigger problem. The natural stressors that come with finally entering adulthood are enough to cause depression and anxiety, on their own. Being in college, and out there on your own can bring the reality adulthood in the real world to your attention faster than you may realize. From age eighteen to around twenty-two years old can be the most fun, but at the same time, the most stressful period of your life for many different reasons. For many, they have to deal with the pressure of school. Having to maintain solid grades in college because everyone is depending on you can be very anxiety provoking, by itself. In some cases a child may be the first person in their family who went to college so they feel as though they have to do exceptionally well, in order to make everyone proud. Another constant stressor about being in school is the “what am I really going to do with my life?” factor that we all deal with.

Even if you’re in college and you have a major, there’s a good chance that at some point you’ve sat down and thought deeply about what your next steps were going to be after you graduate. Where will I live? Who will I live with? What will I do for work? Will I get a job? Is this really what I want to do? Those are just a few questions we lose sleep over every night, trying to map out our lives while figuring out how to maintain good enough grades to keep yourself and your family happy. All that mixed in with trying to figure out who the hell you even are, who your friends are, and maintaining a social life at the same time can be too much to handle. If being in school was so stressful, you’d think not being there would make you happier right? Wrong, there’s a chance that not being at school during this time is even more stressful than being on campus somewhere. When I came home from school to seek help for my depression, I thought I would be relieved to take some time off and just relax. Little did I know, I’d have to answer questions everywhere I went, about why I wasn’t I school, and do so without exposing all of my latest complications. When I did tell a few people the real reason why I came home, I was faced with even tougher questions, that I was working really hard to avoid answering. One of those questions was by far the biggest one and hardest to answer, that question was “what are you depressed about?”

I believe that at least one of the issues with depression is that nobody really understands the severity of it. Seeing that we’re never really taught about depression, or truly engaged in any preventative measures when we are young, we develop a lot of unhealthy misconceptions about the illness. One of those misconceptions is that everybody goes through depression. A lot of times if you hang around a good number of people, sooner or later you’ll hear someone say “I’m depressed”. Most of the time the expression will come after something trivial, like they missed the bus, or failed a test, or run out of their favorite food at home. The thing is, none of those people are really depressed. If they are, it’s not because of those small mishaps. People go around saying they’re depressed all the time when they’re not, and that does nothing but desensitize the actual diagnosis, and make people take the actual illness less seriously. The lack of knowledge the general public has about depression adds to the misconceptions about it, and leads to people/society taking it less seriously. If everybody is walking around thinking that they’re "depressed" and saying so, we’re not going to be able to focus on those really suffering from the real illness and help them get over it.

People continuously asking me “why” I was depressed, was troubling. One of the reasons being that I actually had no idea. When someone is depressed often you find yourself just sitting and just feeling defeated, for no particular reason. Sometimes you wake up and can’t get out of bed, either you simply don’t want to or sometimes, you feel like you just can’t. You have no energy and no motivation, and you couldn’t explain why if your life depended on it - that’s depression. For those who suffer from it, it’s not easy to put the feelings or the stressors that causes it, into words. Putting those horrifying thoughts and feelings you have, for what feels like no reason, into words, can be impossible. All asking me those questions did was to cause me to start questioning myself even more, but now about my illness.

Those questions caused me to look in the mirror and ask myself over and over what was actually wrong with me. At the time, I didn’t realize that depression could be caused by a chemical imbalance and not simply by a series of tragic events. That makes it extremely hard to articulate in simple terms, why you’re depressed. With so many people walking around saying they’re depressed and still functioning and moving forward, I asked myself repeatedly, why couldn’t I? At the time I couldn’t find the strength to realize that those people weren’t depressed, and that’s why they looked so "normal", despite complaining about depression.

For a while, I questioned the severity of the depression and wondered if I was falling just because I was weaker than the average person. Being at home started making me feel even more lost without an identity. At least while I was at school I felt productive like I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing. I felt like I was on the right path, even though I didn’t specifically know where that path was leading. Now I was completely lost, and I had to repeatedly explain myself to others, and feel a sense of disappointment and confusion from each person I talked to. From the outside, it looked to them like my life was perfect. they had no idea what I was going through.

When I was in that room, with Michelle, expressing myself, I was really starting to dig in and find the roots to my depression. During that first appointment we laid everything out on the table. We created an action plan for what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. I’m a person who loves to know exactly what’s going to happen step by step so creating this map of solutions was great for me.

As we separated my personal problems into categories, the category that had the most difficult issues to resolve, included grief over the loved ones I’d lost along the way. One major loss for me is still the loss of my grandfather. With my father being in and out of my life since I was young, my grandfather was the most important male figure to me since birth. He was my role model and someone I either saw in person or talked to on the phone every day no matter what. I never needed for anything as long as he was around and he made sure that literally everyone in the family was good at all times. He was the patriarch of my family and my father figure so when he unexpectedly passed away, I lost myself. Not a day goes by where I don’t think about my grandfather, so often times I allow myself to shut down about it.

Like most people I’m sure, I’ve never been the best at grieving. Losing people is an occurrence that I’ve had to deal with way too often, but still can’t wrap my head around. I kind of tuck the feelings away deep inside and try not to deal with them. Losing someone who had such a huge impact on my life so suddenly, was too much for me to fathom and to this day it tears me apart, from the inside out. Being in my old neighborhood and seeing the house that I grew up in with my grandparents and all of the loving memories, always gets to me. My grandmother, now suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia, now lives in an Alzheimer’s facility, and after seeing her in the condition she’s in, makes it almost impossible for me to even visit.