Things can get very bleak, very fast in this world. It's a very lonely career with a lot of opposition, not a lot of love, no co-workers, and a very negative context surrounding your life choice.
Depression is actually very common among artists of all sorts. Some of my artist contacts tell me it helps them do better art, so they just kinda go with it. Others can't and fold under the pressure.
I've found myself walking that very fine line for over a year, now. Since last April. This is my story of the artist's depression battle.
Around that time, I realized the people I had surrounded myself with were awful people, save one or two of them. I was spending time with nasty, ill-tempered humans simply because they accepted me, and so I accepted them without realizing how immature and hurtful to others they were. When I finally did clue in, I panicked and began to recess into myself, and rely heavily on the one person I KNEW was a good person in my life because he was literally the opposite of everyone else.
When they saw that I no longer seemed to find their nasty antics amusing (Stopped going to the parties they organized simply for the sake of bashing our friend's girlfriend... specifically) and would become quiet in their rant-sessions, they knew something was up, and slowly began to see me as a threat to their heavenly retreat of hate.
So I entered May and June slowly growing apart from everyone in my life, having a financial crisis and watching helplessly as my University royally screwed me over financially because of a clerical error, thus denying my right to a diploma for six months after. Around this same time, my mother lashed out again and things continued to go downhill in the form of a slippery spiral of guilt on my part for being a terrible daughter. My work as an artist went through a rough spot, and a self-employed majority background and a music diploma that didn't exist yet weren't helping me to find a for-now job that would keep me a float. My desperation and guilt left me feeling like a failure of a human being and, after three weeks of eating nothing but plain white rice and peanut butter out of the jar, I decided I needed to do SOMETHING to make up for my shortcomings.
So, for that reason, in June, I packed my bags and headed down to Florida to spend a couple of weeks with that family.
It was the worst decision I could have made.
After being verbally abused and watching my parents beat the crap out of each other, after days of acting more like a parent to my sister and brother than their parents were, I finally had a mental meltdown and spent the majority of a day curled up in a ball, on the floor, shaking and crying and screaming whenever someone tried to talk to me, because I was terrified of how utterly trapped and isolated I had managed to make myself. Eventually they locked their pets in the room with me because they figured, hey, if they can't deal with their psychologically screwed up daughter, the family cat and runt-dog could.
Unfortunately for my ego, they were right, and I was able to calm down thanks to the animals.
My mother, as she often does, suddenly decided she was going to try to deal with my craziness (and I say that with a serious meaning) in a human way and take me away to Mexico (where they had bought a vacation house...) to spend some time in the sun, on a beach, potentially with horses.
Except where she really took me was to their property in the middle of batshit-crazyland, where everyone knew everyone and was trying to get them arrested by corrupt police and have their property seized, as if it was a sport. When we arrived there it was quiet for a few days, and then all hell broke loose when some crazy ass people showed up at our door demanding that we hand over the keys to our vehicle which they claimed was theirs. My mom then decided this would be the best time to pretend not to be around and leave her suffering daughter to deal with scary crazy people in the middle of a foreign country.
When I proved to be doing surprisingly well at that, she decided to give me more of a challenge by busting out of the house and screaming like a madwoman and making the situation so much worse and a million times harder for me to handle. So when that all came to a very angry, tense end, I had another (different) meltdown in which I once more shut down outwardly and couldn't do anything but stare at the wall and tremble in panic.
Oh, then there was a hurricane coming. So I panicked even more. I didn't sleep that night, just stared at the wall and out the window, wondering if I would die from a heart attack or a gunshot first.
When morning came around, my mother asked me what the best course of action would be, and I couldn't respond, so she booked an emergency flight back. We flew to Florida first thing we could and I got a straight connecting flight home from there, and haven't been back since.
When I got home, the trip had only made me worse and I wasn't any better on the financial front. So I had to somehow find a job and deal with being in a constant state of terror due to a serious case of "being broked" as my one friend put it.
So naturally I decided the best job would be sales, because when you're too terrified to talk to your normal friends you must be great at talking to strangers, right? Well, I was actually pretty good at it, but as I mentioned before I hated my life the whole time, and felt awful for what I was doing and had many emotional breakdowns over the course of the next month.
However, my friends had decided on going to a concert in Los Angeles featuring my favorite band of all time, and so they invited me to join them. As I was working, I had the money to do so and gladly accepted.
I had already decided to quit my job when I had my accident. In fact, I was considering doing it that very day when I was on my way to the job. On my way there, as I was biking along, I got very violently blindsided by a car who hadn't looked before turning right at top-speed. I slammed into the car and my shoulder bag hooked on the rear view mirror, yanking me violently before the bag's strap broke, thank God. My left hip and shoulder were knocked out of alignment, my left knee and right shoulder were dislocated, and I had three pulled and two torn muscles in my left arm. The doctors set me right but couldn't give me medication for the impending PTSD, because of prescription meds for tendinitis and insomnia that I was already on.
So they released me ONLY on the grounds that I had someone home to talk me down. I called my roommate to tell her about the accident, and she said she would be home, so I allowed myself to leave the hospital.
No one was there when I got home.
I called my RM again, only to have her tell me she had gone to a mutual friend's house but would be back later. Later came by and found me in a similar situation of being curled up on the couch, unable to move because I was shaking so hard, struggling not to puke every where from panicking, and crying uncontrollably for hours on end. RM wouldn't answer her phone so I sent her a text asking when she'd be home and she said "not tonight." So I spent the rest of the night in terrible pain and panic and shock, and when morning came still no one was there. No one would answer their phone and my one reliable friend worked in roofing, so I couldn't call him or I was sure he'd fall to his death answering my phone call.
Evening came around, and I had only been able to move to get some water, some pain medication, and to go to the bathroom before I resumed the position either on the floor of our kitchen or on the couch in the living room. I don't think I've ever cried that hard in my life. It was a bit pathetic, picture-wise, but nonetheless a very grim scene.
When RM finally came home, she informed me her and some of my closest friends had gone on a day-long road trip that they didn't want to tell me about because they were afraid I'd try to tag along. Then she asked how I was after my accident. It broke my heart, a bit, even though I had been drifting away from those people, I still was rather attached to them and the thought of them thinking of me in that manner was sickening. I told her I had spent the day curled up on the couch and crying from PTSD and was in horrible pain and told her to help me get to my room, because getting into bed was impossible because I couldn't pick myself up properly. She did that much and I regressed into silence.
Within a day, my job was demanding that I come back to work, so I quit.
Eventually, I got better, and I went to Los Angeles which was great for the concert and time spent with 2 of the 6 people (the 2 are now in my group of best friends), but two people in particular seemed to blame everything wrong that happened on me, and one seemed to think he had to do everything, despite the fact that I found us STUPID cheap flights, FREE lodging with free food/booze as an extension, and FREE ride to the concert. But sure. I had become an emotional punching bag for these two people, who were at the time in the group of nasty friends.
Upon coming back home, I went to hang out with that nasty group of people, where they proceeded to get super high and super drunk and go on a huge rant to me about how awful a person and shitty a friend I was and how they hated that I was so uptight and thought that I brought everyone down. After a couple of hours of abuse, I shakily left the house, apologizing for my shortcomings. I stood outside the house and called my one friend who had been there for me all along, and he came and picked me up. That was the last time I ever hung out with those people.
This time had brought us to the end of August. I had become severely emotionally invested in a guy, I had grown apart from the only friends I had known for two years, and was restricted to one friend who worked insane hours and thus wasn't always able to help. The guy, in true fashion to my luck, ignored my affections and started going out with another girl, and I think it broke the one last part of me I had left to be hopeful about.
I entered my last year of University a beat-up, ruined human being. And it wasn't going to get easier, either.
I got a few harassing phone calls from the crazy Mexicans, because like a genius my mother had written my number down somewhere and they got a hold of it. My school's finance stuff was still a mess, and they had screwed it up further, and I was living with a roommate who now hated me because she was obligated to due to my former group of friends which she was a part of. I was falling behind in classes due to stress, and my student loans weren't coming in on time, so I was always mere hours away from being kicked out of school.
Eventually, with school blocking out all of my personal life, I was able to get a hold of myself temporarily in order to sort out the finances and get my butt in gear and pull my class marks up, eventually getting a 4.0 GPA that semester despite the hardships. I found not-nasty people to be friends with, and they slowly helped bring me out of my hole.
Medical problems kept getting in the way, though. I was in constant physio therapy along with chrio, massage, and acupuncture from my accident's injuries. Doctors kept telling me to hold off on drum school for a year to get better, but it was the only thing keeping me from spiraling back down, so I kept going.
All this combined with THREE debilitating sickness sweeps in six months, and I hadn't really made any progress with my life.
Eventually, one by one, I found out that some of the people that had been in my life for a while were actually amazing people who were willing to help me get better, and they have been helping me a bunch. There have been a MILLION setbacks, and I'm still very very deep in the woods. However, I am getting a lot better. I haven't had a psychological breakdown in a long while (knock on wood), but I'm still suffering from severe anxiety and panic attacks. I've had them since I went through the abuse when I was 12/13, but they've been much worse this year.
I panic talking to new people, I panic when I have to confront someone, and I panic if I think I've done something wrong. I panic when I feel the slightest twinge in my skeleton. I'm almost constantly suffering from acute anxiety, broken only when I'm surrounded by the amazing people I have found.
And when I do art.
So, that's why I'm currently your resident brooding artist. I have a lot to brood about.
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