Drug Abuse & Mental Illness

An 18 year old like myself, who struggles with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, often finds herself too caught up in her own mind trying to analyze whether or not she's doing good enough, if she did everything she needed to get done, and if she's being mindful of other people in her life, but it all just turns into a recipe for disaster when she does this. Me, that is. How can such innocent thoughts cause disaster in one's life? Easy. Throw in mental illness, and that can feel like the whole disaster itself.

Depression is something I have been struggling with since I was fourteen years old, and when years of therapy, different diagnoses and pills don't seem to do the trick, you start searching for fixes of your own.

The experimentation with drugs and alcohol began years before my freshman year in college, but college is when life became very real and almost too much to handle. That is when my hand reached for liquor and other substances more than any point in my life. At first it began as the normal thing to do; party every weekend, make new friends, it's college! Right?

I started to notice every weekend my friends seemed to still be having fun, enjoying the party life, while I was quickly growing more depressed and tired of it. I downed shots, beer, and jungle juice, trying to feel the same way as them. But the truth is... I had no clue how they were feeling. For all I know, we could be living the same harsh reality, which is the fact that we were adults of the millennial generation, thrown into the world of higher education to eventually get good paying jobs. If we didn't? Then according to everyone around us, we weren't amounting to anything. There seemed to be something missing, though. We just didn't seem that happy at a point in life where we were supposed to be the happiest. Or maybe it was just me...

I tend to be that girl at parties you find sitting alone on a couch with her solo cup because she has too much social anxiety to socialize and she's too depressed to dance. So why attend? Because when you're struggling with mental illness such as depression and anxiety, it feels better to struggle with a cup of alcohol in your hand than laying down all alone in your tiny dorm, because you know you're definitely not touching those textbooks on a Friday night.

When college first began, I sensed so much hope, freshness, freedom, and just simply new things! I was so happy the first month of college, but then depression hit me harder than a shot of vodka. So many feelings of stress, hopelessness, and homesickness arose. The parties on weekends weren't making me happy, getting out of bed for class began to feel impossible, I was starting to fail a class, I had scholarships at stake, I was broke, everything just felt like it was crashing down. So I went to what felt familiar, but what also made me numb to these issues I was not ready to deal with head on. I started smoking more cigarettes than ever before, I forced myself to drink on the weekends and even weekdays... It felt like I needed all of the substances and more just to get through the week.

Wake up. Drink coffee. Smoke cigarette. Smoke another cigarette. Check social media while doing all of this. Go to class. Nap. More coffee. More Cigarettes. End night with booze. Snooze.

My days started to mesh into smears of yesterdays and plans of tomorrows I'd never accomplish. The girl who was once so ambitious to start college got stuck in an endless cycle of substances that were not helping her mentally or physically. It wasn't until recently that I believed a change needed to be made.

Sometimes when dealing with depression, you want the easy way out. When you can't find it? You rather choose to feel nothing. What I learned though this entire experience is that even though I did not ask for any of these problems I have mentally, they're not going to go away no matter where I am in life, but what I can try to do is force myself to be productive instead of drowning myself in tempting substances. My end goal is to be happy and healthy, so why indulge myself in things I know aren't going to be helpful to my mental growth? I know I'm still going to have days where my body feels paralyzed with sadness, and I don't want to get out of bed, but I have to. And so do you. Everyone's end goal should be to want to get better so that they can see the beauty in life and the reasons why we are here in the first place. Though life can be stressful and hard to deal with at times, I want to be present for all of it. Not blacked out on a couch at a party on a Friday night.