Running Back To Myself

By: Smita Nalluri | @smitanalluri

[TW: mental health, SI)

When I wanted to go to college 3,000 miles across the country, my mom had only one condition — visit it first. For someone who grew up in 70-degree suburbia, it seemed fair enough to experience the bone-chilling cold and isolation of upstate New York firsthand before committing to living there for the next 4 years. But I was 17 and knew everything, so naturally I refused. I told her I was going to college to run and get a good education and that was all I cared about. 

In my defense, I didn’t decide where I was going to school on a whim. I had done an extensive amount of research weighing my options, but I completely disregarded a lot of factors that I thought didn’t matter — weather, accessibility, distance from home, campus atmosphere, location. You know? Just the small things. 

I told my mom that I had already made up my mind and that a visit wasn’t going to change it. I said that even if I hated the school when I visited, I was still going to go because it was my best option to pursue my running career. My mom (and every other person I talked to) asked me to consider if I would still be happy at the school if I wasn’t running, “for some odd reason.” Offended by the mere suggestion of not running anymore, I responded in a condescending way that only someone with a lethal combination of naivety and arrogance could do — “Mom, if I’m not running ‘for some odd reason,’ I won’t be happy anywhere.”  

Never have I been so right and so wrong.

If I asked someone to describe me today, I don’t think reserved would be the first word that would come to mind. Actually, I don’t think it would be the hundredth. But if I had asked someone the same question freshman year, it would have been the only word.

When I was depressed, I didn't know that I was for about 80% of the time. I knew I was feeling sad and frustrated all the time, but I attributed all of that to the external circumstances around me — having a terrible cross country season, breaking my foot, getting off to a rough start academically in college, breaking my leg, not being able to run, continuing to do poorly sophomore year, having no close friends, breaking my back, almost failing classes. From an outside perspective, it seems like anyone would have felt sad and frustrated during this time. But the thing is, I wasn't. "Sad" and "frustrated" would have been if I was pissed off for an hour after a bad race or flung something after I got my grades back. But I was pissed off for the better part of 3 years and the only thing I was flinging was insults at myself daily. 

It's ironic because on questionnaires diagnosing depression, they ask you if you've "had feelings of sadness or loneliness lasting for more than 2 weeks." And every time I filled out one of those surveys, I answered honestly: "No". Because when you're depressed, it's not a mood or a feeling you feel — it's a mindset. So "sadness" and "loneliness" in my mind, didn't apply to me. They were just the new baseline. I didn't believe I was depressed because I always thought things would turn around. I truly believed that "even the longest night was followed by a morning.”

So I just thought I was biding my time until my morning came. 

And it did — my sophomore spring things started looking way up. I got a procedure done on my back that helped immensely, got cleared to start cross training again, found a subject I was actually doing well in, and had some friends. Yet, at the end of my best semester of college to date, I tried to jump off of a bridge. Confused? So was I.

The external factors around me had done a complete 180, but inside I was panicking. On paper, I should have been feeling happy and uplifted, but the only emotion I felt was guilt. I felt like an utter waste of people's time and energy and I couldn't shake the feeling that everyone would be better off without me. I never lost hope that things would get better when they were bad, but where did that leave me when things around me got better and I didn't?

Honestly terrified. Because now, I had nothing to fall back on. Nothing to blame my depressing thoughts on. I couldn't figure out why I still felt so trapped and I didn’t really want to since that meant facing the harsh reality that my despondence came from within my own self. So, as futile as the attempt was, I tried to run as far as I possibly could from myself.

I figured I’d never have to confront my thoughts if I never gave myself time to think. So when I went home that summer, I tried to make myself as busy as possible. I would wake up at 4:45 and go to bed at 1 in the morning, filling the time in between with work, working out, and wallowing. When my thoughts caught up with me, which they eventually always did, they would convince me that I was a drain on society, that my presence was hurting the ones around me.

“Depression is insidious because it infiltrates your brain and attacks every known weakness you have to tell you that you’re not good enough or that everyone hates you. It twists your worldview and skews your perspective and it’s hard to disentangle what your real thoughts are from what’s just the depression talking.”

One of the things I was most insecure about when I was depressed was being a “bad person.” I thought that no one liked me because I was a self-centered asshole. And ironically enough, I was right — but not for the reasons I thought. Being hypercritical of my every personality trait only led me to hate myself and in the process try to subdue myself. And all that ended up doing was making me a hollowed out version of myself. So when I was interacting with the people around me, I wasn’t really bringing much to the table. I thought people cared about me because of my accomplishments, when in reality, they cared about me for who I was.

I think I hurt a lot of people around me during that period because I was hypersensitive to everything people would say. Depression made me an uninsulated wire, so that everything I touched caused sparks to fly. I think this was the case because I was so insecure about who I was that anything anyone would say would rub me the wrong way. It’s hard to have healthy relationships with people when they feel like they’re constantly walking on eggshells around you. I was so in my own head that I pushed everyone else away and I know I hurt those who cared about me, and for that I sincerely apologize.

That summer, my depression was deeply intertwined with my own thoughts and I had no way of discerning the two. I was so mentally screwed up that instead of getting help after the first time I tried to kill myself, I was convinced that it was the most “rational” course of action. My depression convinced me that as much pain as my family would be in if I killed myself, it would still be less than the pain I was causing them by being around now. So I came up with a plan to end things on my birthday because “that way people would only have to think of me once a year, instead of twice.” Well, my birthday came and went and I (thankfully) didn’t do anything because I slowly started to realize that my depression and my mind were two separate entities and that I didn’t agree with the warped ideas my depression was espousing. Once I could make that distinction, I started to realize the truth that if I had killed myself, it wouldn’t have mattered if it was my birthday, or the day that I died, or the Friday after the Spring Equinox, my family would’ve thought about me everyday and it would’ve destroyed them.

Realizing my depression was separate from myself gave me the power to fight back against it. Depression distorts reality and makes it hard to figure out a way to get out of it. It’s like you’re trying to escape a maze, blindfolded, drunk, and after being spun around a few times — you have no idea which way the exit is or even up from down. Differentiating between my depression and my thoughts was like removing that blindfold. To  everyone I’ve been lucky enough to get to know over the past couple years, whether you knew it or not: you were my guide out of that maze and I don’t know where I would be without that support. I can’t thank you all enough for allowing me to be myself again.

For someone who hates change as much as I do, getting out of my depression maze was the most uncomfortable thing I’ve had to do. Hanging out with people I didn’t really know well made my stomach turn and I would shake as I walked up to their houses, but I forced myself to do it because I knew that it was part of my recovery process.

I remember isolating myself in my dorm room freshman year because I thought I hadn’t “earned” friends. I remember the heaviness of the weight of the world on my shoulders and I remember the agonizing frustration of feeling like I was constantly swimming upstream. I remember clenching a fist in rage at myself and not being able to unclench it for years. I remember not being able to concentrate on anything for more than a couple minutes or sleep for more than a couple hours because my mind was too busy itemizing a list of all the ways I had screwed up or enumerating all the reasons why people might not like me. I remember struggling to get out of bed in the morning because every day just seemed like another opportunity to make more mistakes to stoke my personal hate fire.

But I also remember the first time that someone called out to say hi to me in the hallway. I remember the first time someone invited me to go out with them. I remember the first time someone trusted me enough to open up to me.

I was lucky enough to beat my depression because I realized that I needed to make some sort of change. I used to think that the greatest feeling in the world was winning. And as incredible as that rush of adrenaline is and as much as I still chase that feeling, it pales in comparison to the feeling you get when someone is genuinely excited to see you.

Coming to terms with my deepest fears, recognizing they exist and why they exist was and still is terrifying. For someone who never divulged anything more than my favorite food or color to my “closest friends”, opening up to others about my struggles was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. Being vulnerable is not a comfortable thing at all and it still scares me senseless, but I know it’s the only way to take the power away from my depression.

The reason I’m writing this article is because I want people to know that they’re not alone. Everyone has struggled or is struggling with their own mental demons, no matter how big or small. I still have the occasional bad day and I know I have flaws — I don’t have an inside voice, the word “moderation” isn’t in my vocabulary, and I have the spatial awareness of a 3-year old. But I also know that these flaws don’t define me. And I promise your flaws don’t define you either. Depression takes your insecurities and amplifies them until your view of yourself is just a caricature of all your flaws. You think that you’re everything you’ve never wanted to be, and it couldn’t be farther from the truth.