Freshman Year + Depression

Disclaimer: The following is an edited version of a speech I gave three years ago titled “What Starts Here Changes The World” about my first semester at the University of Texas. It was one of five entries in a themed showcase titled “Firsts.” Some ideas have been elaborated upon or rewritten for clarity and grammatical purposes but nothing has been taken out. There are some topics discussed below that time has given me a new understanding or recollection of. That being said, I wanted to present my truth, whatever it may have been at the time. Enjoy.

In high school, despite the circumstances, I was pretty popular.

When I say despite the circumstances I mean that I was in theatre, which wasn’t as bad as some people might think. We were just known as the sluts of the entire high school. We all dated each other and it was pretty filthy and disgusting. I came out as gay my junior year. That wasn’t too bad either (at school) because once I came out people who teased me for being gay finally just looked homophobic instead of funny. I played football which usually isn’t a bad thing either, but I lived in Texas and our high school football team sucked. So, despite all that I was still relatively popular. I think the biggest thing for me, or the biggest circumstance to say, was that I was a huge nerd in high school. I was involved in anything and everything academic. I was top 10 percent of my class, I did duel credit, honor society, all that stuff. Early on, kids knew “Devon, that’s the smart kid”. And I kind of unwittingly embraced that and let it define me as a person.

I think that happened because I grew up living with my grandparents.

My grandparents met in the military and I think being in the military for so long transferred into how they raised their kids. We had, what I thought at the time were, a lot of rules and we didn’t do some of the things other kids did. There was always this whole thing with other kids. They’d be like, “Oh, you don’t know xyz?” or “You don’t do this or that?” and we’d be like, “We live with our grandparents,” and our friends would just be like “Oh, okay, I get it.” And, not to bash my mom and uncles, but knowing my grandparents and their parenting style and the opportunities they gave their children, I don’t think their first generation of kids lived up to their potential, which became a legitimate fear of mine as I got older. When my brother and I moved in with my grandparents I aways felt like maybe they considered it another chance for them raise successful children because they were really hard on us, me especially because I was the older brother. One semester in elementary school I came home with exceptionally good grades and a note that says, “He’s reading above the normal level” and they were like, “OK, this is the standard now.”

Growing up, and especially in high school, it was really tough for me because I was always in constant competition with someone.

I feel like I’d come home with good grades and it was always, "That’s great but —". If I came home with grades that were better or on par with everyone else’s but weren’t a personal best, then I’d become complacent. If it was a personal best but wasn’t on par with everyone else, I wasn’t studying hard enough. I was never allowed to be proud of myself for long. That really molded and defined success for me in high school, literally being better than everyone else and setting impossible standards for myself.

Somehow, through all of that, I became this support system for my friends.

I started off as the resident tutor. They’d come to me for help with their homework or pay me to write their essays, but that turned into people coming to me for advice about their lives and relationships and goals so that’s probably why I want to be a therapist now. It came to the point when people would contradict me and my friends would be like, “No, don’t argue with Devon. Devon’s always right.” That filled my head and I fed off of that. It gave me self-esteem. That got me through, despite what was going on at home. The biggest accomplishment for me in high school was that I started college when I was 16. And some people tried to knock that as the typical dual-credit thing that a lot of students do but other students weren’t driving every day to the next town over to take a 12-hour course load on TOP of being in high school so I was always very proud of myself for that. And that’s probably a big reason why I ended up in the situation I was in when I came to college.

Coming to UT, I didn’t treat my first semester as a typical first.

I wasn’t scared or daunted. It wasn’t a big deal to me. Hell, graduating high school wasn’t big for me because school was mandatory. It was something you’re supposed to do. My mentality was, “I'm gonna crush this shit. No big deal. Its only the best school in the state, whatever”. Then I took my first honors class. I remember all of a sudden being around all these people and everyone is the academic badass from their high school. Everyone is the valedictorian. Everyone was in the top 10 percent and since that’s what motivated me for so long, I didn’t have anything else. I went from being extraordinary to ordinary and that ruined my life. It hit me like a bus that I was a part of the crowd. And it was so weird because I would think to myself, “How are these kids so smart?” “How are they picking this stuff up so fast?” “How do they know these things already?” I felt like I hadn’t been doing enough, like I wasn’t trying because the material wasn’t coming to me like I was use to. I became the person that I looked down on high school, despite the fact that I wasn’t even slacking off. Its not that I didn’t care or wasn’t trying but at the end of class I would feel so dumb and I’d feel so defeated. It was unbearable.

I had ceased to be this rockstar in class, so college was dead for me.

Very quickly I fell down this slope of depression and soon I’d completely given up. I stopped going to class. I stopped going to work. I would just lie in bed and think these thoughts about how I wasn’t good enough and how I wasn’t going to make anything of myself so there was no point in making goals. It’s the first time that I had real issues in my life that affected me this much. And that was the worst part because I’d get down on myself even more because I felt like I didn’t have real problems, like I was being ungrateful because surely someone somewhere had it worse than; had real issues to deal with, not some petty bullshit about grades slipping. I’d wake up in the morning and with this weight on my chest and I wouldn’t move, I would just stay there for hours. I wouldn’t eat. I wouldn’t talk to anyone. I would just stay in my dorm. And after going through that for days and weeks, I started thinking about killing myself. Once that started, everything that I did and saw was a sign of my depression and suicidal thoughts. For example, my freshman year I lived in Andrews Dormitory. Because Andrews is so old there was a lot of exposed pipe in the rooms and commons, so when I would wake up in the morning the first thing I would see was this exposed pipe that ran across the entryway and I’d think to myself, “I wonder if that pipe can support my weight”. I look out the window and see the beautiful Spanish architecture and ask myself if I was content with that being the last thing I ever saw. But the worst part for me was this big huge tower in the middle of campus. For Longhorns, the main building is a symbol of excellence and hope and everything that UT is but at this point in the year, that’s not what it was for me anymore. All I saw when I saw the tower was myself jumping from the carillon enclosure. At one point I had this whole idea about joining the carillonneurs so that one day I could go up, play a Beyoncé song, and jump off. I was so nonchalant about dying.

By the end of the first semester, I was convinced I was going to fail all my classes (which I should note wasn’t even the case) and that I wouldn’t be able to come home to my family with the grades I would receive so I told myself I was just going to end it. But because I’m too much of a coward to jump off of a building, my plan was to drink my hesitation away and do something like walk into oncoming traffic. I went to a friend’s birthday party that was happening down the street at a dorm that will remain nameless. I found this girl that didn’t drink to play beer pong with me and of course we had no beer so we ended up playing with shots of Jack Daniels. I brought my own shot glass which happened to be a double so I play this game and take what amounts to 20 standard shots of Jack Daniels in a 30 minute period and I don’t remember much after that. I do remember walking through the common room and falling flat on my face. I remember wanting to call my mom because I knew, if anything, I’d want to hear her voice before I died. I remember trying to fight my friends to let me go home but barely making it three steps at a time without stumbling. I guess somewhere in all that fight I turned to someone and said, “No, you have to let me go, I’m trying to kill myself,” so someone in this crowd of people taking care of me knew this was more than drunken behavior. Whoever that person was made sure the others wouldn't let me leave. The final thing I remember is waking up the next morning covered in my own piss, vomit, and sweat with a note taped to me saying “You owe so-and-so a towel and so-and-so a pillow and EVERYONE a thank you for taking care of you last night” and that’s the first time that my depression started to affect other people and unfortunately (or fortunately, however you want to look at it), THAT was my initial motivation to do something about it.

All of my friends ended up finding out what happened and after a few weeks they convinced me to go to therapy.

When I finally went and was finally honest with myself, I felt broken and imperfect and not at all like the badass I was in high school and somehow it was the most beautiful thing in my entire life. There was no pressure or expectations. It was just me being myself and being honest about the things I wanted out of life. I finally started to think about making decisions based on what I wanted for myself and not on what I thought my family wanted out of me and I was finally comfortable with that. I also started to learn to trust people and to ask for help. I realized that I can't put out so much energy without getting any back from the people around me so I started to ask other people for advice and was able to lean on other peoples’ shoulders. Ultimately I learned more that first semester out of the classroom than I did in because I learned so much about myself and life so I don’t look back at that time with regret. It broke me down but more importantly, it built me up and redefined my idea of success and made me start to value my own happiness.