This is the story of a stunning depression, welcome!

Yes, I’m currently celebrating my depression. I have had so many wonderful experiences in my life, I have wonderful parents and a family that loves me, I’ve always had everything that I needed, I’ve even been the best student, I think I’m a good friend, and I won the lottery with the best man on Earth I have ever met. Nonetheless, today I celebrate infinitely the depression that invaded getting me almost to the end of my life.

Until my 29 years of life, I have had two very bad experiences that have turned my life in a very determined way. I have had of course those very good moments, but those have not changed my life, they have made me a better person, have boosted my way, but they’ve not made me a different person. I will tell you a bit about the first one and certainly about the second one, but most importantly, I will describe the learnings, because I discovered that the passion and fire in my life rely on that, on everything that I can learn. But rather than what I can learn to say, what I can learn to do.

This story was originally written in Spanish (here it is!) and then I also did the same exercise in Italian (Italian version here) because I wanted to show it to the family of my boyfriend. Then another friend said she would like to read it but I could only offer her English, so I told her that I was planning to do it in English, but that was lie, she motivated me. Hopefully she will like my lie!. Before starting with the stories, for those of you who read up to now and perhaps need to leave already, here is the most important conclusion: Writing, reading, singing, dancing, as well as loving and being happy, are things that anybody at anytime can learn to do.

You’ve probably already deduced that I’m one of those deep thinkers. And yeah, you’re right, but as beautiful as it may sound, there are also a lot of disadvantages on that. When I was 18, I fell in love with Otoniel, a very romantic and passionate boy that made me fall in love with all the beautiful things that were in our scope at the time. He was (he still is but I will speak in past tense) very handsome, a lot of girls were interested in him. Me personally no, but because of all my insecurities with myself. Since I met him, I thought he was really cute but it always seemed to me a worthless illusion to imagine he could like me. But well, without an explanation, he did. He fell in love with me, I know that. And I know that the love we had for each other was so clean, peaceful and sincere, that we never hurt each other, I never even thought about being with someone else and I know he also didn’t think about that. Since ever, even after I left him, we stayed friends and we still are. We were together for about a year, but our relationship was stunning. However, I always had a problem. I never liked or accepted myself the way I was. I also never completely believed that he could actually love me the way I was. I was always feeling the people talking behind me questioning why he would like a girl like me.

So that, in the middle of such a wonderful relationship, I fell into anorexia. With 158 cm of height I was weighting 35 kilos. If you’re American and don’t know how to interpret those measurements, well, it’s just a pretty low weight. I don’t feel proud of that, even less knowing that it was the reason why I broke up with Otoniel. Everything got out of control, everything was wrong inside me. One day I felt that I couldn’t even stand myself, that I couldn’t control my mind and my fears, the prison I lived in with the food was unbearable and I decided to tell him that I couldn’t keep going with our relationship. I broke his heart and made him suffer a lot, but he suffered neither more nor less than I did. A few hours after he left, I regretted it and I begged him to forget it and to get back together, but he never returned. So I call this first moment of change “heartbroken anorexia” (This is actually a much cooler name than the one I found in the other languages!). I saw how every little remaining piece of soul got destroyed with his farewell.

After medical assistance, emotional and moral support, and every type of help, I had to start getting over Otoniel. He would never come back to me. At the same time I recovered my weight, even more than necessary, my problems with food got, let’s say, eternal but not extreme. In the Spanish version I said I would talk about that in another moment, but I actually described in this post the way I got out of that prison 8 years later. I didn’t mention there that it was the way I did it, but you my English readers know it now. I managed to recover much of my mental control and one day I found a complete different path that helped me definitely forget about Otoniel. I started studying Statistics at the “Universidad Nacional de Colombia”, a bit as a scape I should say. Never before had I had a serious contact with science and math, it was the very first time, not even in school I was so much into it. A bit in a random way, I ended up studying such a thing I didn’t even know exactly what it was about. I happened to find in science the shelter I was hoping for. A shelter that completely grabbed my attention and my passion. It turned out to be so strong that, ever since and I hope for the rest of my life, I keep being so much in love with my profession. Do you remember when I mentioned in the beginning that I’ve been the best student? I graduated from this university with all the existing honours. But hey!, what really makes me proud of that is to know and claim that every single good (excellent) grade was nothing but the product of my love and passion for what I was doing. Otoniel fell again in love little after and he still is with the same girl. He deserves to be happy and I will always be happy for his good experiences.

Ready for more? The passion that I found with my profession and my job came to be (unfortunately) the only big source of fuel in my life. And well, it’s not very smart to have only one source of fuel, if it doesn’t work, nothing will work. And that happened to me. After following my desires to become a better statistician and prepared myself more professionally, I started to have little bad experiences. It’s not important to mention the details about this, but actually, in honour to the friend who will likely read this, those “little bad experiences” all happened when I came to live in her country. I started to generate SMF’s (small and medium-sized frustrations) at work. Without noticing, those SMF’s got accumulated in time and fed, little by little and latently, a very big bomb. The relationships with people weren’t working nicely, the results everywhere were unsatisfying. In the middle of such a mess I always felt that it was my surrounding the one in fault for my SMF’s, not me. I simply couldn’t adapt myself to this new environment that received me after I decided to leave my comfort zone in Colombia.

All these words are most likely familiar to many of you, because even though the contexts and experiences are quite different for each of us, the feelings or sensations are quite similar and common. I lived 3 years of my life generating these SMF’s. I never realised that I carried upon my shoulders a big heavy box containing all of those. I walked like that during all that time. I passed on these frustrations from work to home. I got to live in a way that I couldn’t do any regular activity with good mood. Not even chores at home or do the groceries. I stopped having a good sleep and I started to feel that every morning I was out of that energy that I used to have to do all my activities before. It was then also a very smart idea to start blaming myself for all of those physical limitations, blaming myself for not being able to be like I was little before, because why not to have self bad judgement when you’re tearing down? you know, it’s always better to finish what has already started.

One day I had a worse experience at work than the ones I had already had before. One experience that once it fell into my box, it broke it, and then it broke me. My head exploded and then my body did. I broke again my heart and soul similar to how it happened 10 years ago. My family was devastated and away from me. Marco, that wonderful man that I found, suffered a lot. I stopped going to work and I was just spending the days on the couch of my house crying and crying over again. I opened the eyes in the morning and I started to feel that I couldn’t physically leave the bed. Physically I said.

Day after day, crying about my SMBF’s (small, medium-sized and big frustrations), I started to cry because of fear. I started to fear the future that awaited me with this life. I was scared of being so much out of control mentally and physically speaking. I kept blaming so bad this damn awful context that welcomed me once and did so much bad on me and I was fearing so much that I would never be able to leave it. Then I talked one day to one of my best friends, Molina (that’s her last name but we love to call her that because her name is too common in Spanish and too controversial in English). She’s gorgeous and wonderful, you’ll be happy to meet her!. That was the very first time in those 3 years that I talked to a friend in the pure middle of my depression crisis. She did not cheer me up. Without reticence or inhibition, she simply told me that I had a problem and I needed to look for medical help. Urgently. And no, I hadn’t done it yet, I was always simply thinking how everything would be bad forever.

Once I opened myself to Molina, I started being honest also to myself. From that day, I embarked myself into a trip full of learnings like I never experienced it before. I put together all the words that Marco, my family, my cousin Cesar and Molina repeated to me so much: I had a problem. Rather than having bad experiences in this context or that other context, that didn’t mean that I was absolutely out of a problem. Now, the advantage of having a problem is that there are two and only two options: Either we find the solution or we don’t. The second option had been my way up to then, and I already knew that in that way I wasn’t happy and I would never be so. I was spending my time thinking what life I would live with my box on my shoulders. Therefore, according to binary theory, there was only one option left: Finding the solution.

What was exactly what I learned? I learned to say NO when it becomes necessary, I learned to stop and think but with the head instead of the heart. Beautifully, I learned to surrender to myself, to accept that I was making a very big mistake that not only affected my mind and body, but also affected those who unconditionally love me. I learned to forgive myself, to stop judging myself for what I couldn’t or didn’t want to keep doing in the same way as before. I learned to give myself the chance to change that thing I had been unstoppably destroying so much. With those first elements, I learned to be a better partner for Marco, to take care of us and our home, because up to then I hadn’t done a good job on that. I learned that all the beings, particularly those humans, have a physical as well as a mental energy. The physical one comes from what gives us calories, that is, food. The mental one may also come to some extend from that, but there is this big source called experiences and thoughts. As such, I learned that depression is an illness that means nothing but the lack of that mental energy. But not only I learned that it is an illness, I learned that there is also the cure for it, with physical or mental resources, the energy in the brain can be recovered. And last, but not least!, I learned that loving as well as being happy are decisions and are also abilities, and those abilities can be learned by anyone at anytime!

Happy learning to all of you!