My Story

Second post.
Let's do this...

For me, I had a happy and easy childhood.
Nothing traumatic happened.
My parents got divorced when I was 10 or 11, but that's pretty common these days and it didn't have a negative effect on me (though at that age, of course, I thought Mummy and Daddy should just hug and say sorry). I was never really confident, popular or 'cool', but I was happy with myself to the degree that I didn't judge myself badly.

When I reached the age of 14, I started getting spots.
Skip forward and I'd developed full-blown Acne.
Not just on my face, but on my body too.
Suddenly, I felt very self-conscious and labelled myself as ugly.
I wanted to be my friends, or anyone else for that matter.
Nobody else seemed to have acne like I did.
Looking back now, it wasn't a severe case but it was definitely enough to affect my self-esteem.

This was the turning point in my life.
As I mentioned briefly in the first post, I took the drug Roaccutane after everything else had failed to help me. I would NOT recommend that drug to my worst enemy (whoever that would be) even though it did help clear my acne.

Because even though I had solved that problem, I wasn't happy.
I still had some light scarring (which has cleared gradually over the years since), but I didn't know what the fuck was wrong with me. There's enough information out there about Roaccutane but, trust me, it can fuck you up and put you in a bad place.

My hair was falling out, my eyes were red all the time, I was sweating excessively, I'd get nosebleeds and headaches often, my body ached all the time, I wanted to kill myself and was crying a lot but had no idea why. I was really angry. I felt different and uncomfortable around others. I stopped taking the drug after five months (my course was scheduled for six) because my skin was a lot better and I seriously felt like I could hurt myself or others. I didn't like what this drug was doing to me and none of my family seemed to understand what I was going through.

I was told these side-effects (amongst others I got) were rare and temporary. That was either ignorance or a lie. The drug clearly has a more extreme effect while taking it, because it's running through your veins, but it is a chemotherapy drug and once it has done it's damage (which it does for many who take it) there's no easy way to undo it. I ended up reading a lot of scary things online and I found myself in a World of Hell. There were people talking about how they took this drug 20 years ago and had been depressed and unwell ever since. That scared the shit out of me. There seemed to be no stories of recovery. Some people claimed things got worse over time.

So, I had all these horrible side effects.
I no longer cried for no reason.
I cried because a drug had ruined my body and I'd believed when the Doctors had said I'd be okay.
I'd swapped one problem for a dozen.
I kept taking the drug despite how I felt because I thought the professionals would know what they were doing. Now it looked like I had no future and would never get better.

With all of this fresh in my mind, you can probably understand how I ended up in a very bad place.
I'm going to end this post here because I don't want to make it too long.
I just wanted to explain why I developed severe depression and anxiety.
In the next post, I will talk about why I stayed depressed for such a long time and what you should avoid doing if you don't want to fall victim to the Depression Trap.

Bye for now,

Stefan