Depression Talk

So, after getting to the seventh grade, I became different.

I was no longer loud and boisterous. My oldest brother used to call me Giggling Brigade. He lost that soon after, and looking back, I think that realizing that I was no longer known as the giggler was the first time I realized that my personality had shifted.

I said before that I learned how to draw up into myself. I’m not sure what I mean by that. When I use that phrase, I picture a turtle drawing its head up into its shell, laying on the side of the road trying not to be noticed. I suppose that this is exactly what I did. I used to be the one to always talk to the teachers, the first to raise my hand to answer a question, the one who was always willing to share something in creative writing class.

Eventually I made myself become unknown. I would never buy any clothes that would stand out in public, I would never raise my hand to answer because, my God, what if I had been wrong? The public school me would have been able to laugh it off. The teased me? Would have dissolved into tears and willed the world to swallow me whole.

I remained this way until I started University in 2004. Once I got to highschool, I remained the silent wallflower. I did meet a boy who became my shield, my protector and my bodyguard for three years. That is not to say that I did not love him, that I did not treasure our time together: he had a role on top of the boyfriend role and I actually feel like this minute, writing him a letter and letting him know what all he actually did do for me. I suppose that some boys like the shy, quiet types who don’t have too much to say, who chew on their hands and don’t make eye contact with others. Every time I acted neurotic around people, he would squeeze my hand, arm, shoulder, whatever he could get a hold of, and say “You’re just TOO CUTE!” I learned to become my ridiculous self around him in private, and towards the end of our relationship, it was a major bone of contention. We fought and he would yell out in exasperation “Why can’t you just be yourself around everyone else? Why do you only act normal around me?!”

I suppose that even then, even after the people who tormented me had moved on to new targets and I was safe hiding behind this long term relationship, I was too ashamed to admit to him that I was the one everyone called loser. I was the one people yelled out obscenities at because the cool kids at school would laugh about it. I can’t believe, looking back, that I couldn’t tell my first real love what actually went on in my past. I told him everything, but I couldn’t manage to tell him that.

And even as I write it out here and now, I don’t know what that says about me. Am I forever scarred because of something that happened in public school? Am I forever broken because I was abnormal in the sixth through eighth grade? And even more important: Does it mean that I am fixed now, no longer broken, because I’ve come back into the loud, obnoxious, centre of attention, drunken fool that I once was?