A Wise Choice

For most of my school years I carried a depression I didn't have a name for. I cried without being able to stop it, I pulled away from friends, my moods swung without warning, and a low hum of feeling worthless followed me around. It stayed with me into college. My parents never figured out what was wrong, so nothing was ever done about it, and things simply continued.

It wasn't until my second year of college that I understood I wasn't living the way the people around me seemed to. That was when I decided to do something myself. Doctors and medication had always made me uneasy; I didn't trust either, so I went looking online instead. I found plenty of others describing the same thing, and a handful who had written about climbing out of depression without medication. I tried their approaches. A few helped for a little while and then stopped working, so I kept reading and testing until I found the things that actually held. After roughly two years of struggle, with help from my college psychologist, I came out the other side.

The years that followed were the best of my life, and I lived them fully. Good job, a boyfriend I adored, a lovely apartment, friends who mattered. There was a lightness to everything. I performed well at work, my boyfriend was crazy about me, friends leaned on me when they needed support, and my parents were at ease. All of it fed my confidence, and it felt like I had everything. What I didn't see at the time was that I had built a kind of bubble around myself that kept the depression out. My behavior had changed, which changed the people and situations around me, and the two kept reinforcing each other until there was little room left for dark thoughts to get in.

Then my boyfriend proposed. We were overjoyed. And within six months the whole thing flipped over.

I had wanted children my entire life and planned to have one soon after the wedding. Three months into the marriage I still hadn't conceived. Over the next three months anxiety took hold of me. Everyone kept saying it was far too early to involve a doctor, and part of me didn't want to go, but I went anyway. He gave me the worst news I can imagine: a problem with my uterus meant I would never be able to carry a child. It landed like something heavy dropped straight onto me. My head and chest felt leaden, my throat closed up, no words came. I didn't cry at the hospital. I just sat there, silent.

At home the crying came, and then I didn't leave my room for three days. My friends, my husband, my parents were frightened. I couldn't take the news in, and the depression I thought I'd left behind slipped back. The same worthlessness, the crying I couldn't control, the mood swings, all of it returned. Looking back, I think my husband suffered more than I did, because I stopped talking to him. I would sit at home feeling like something already buried.

That went on for more than five months. One day my husband insisted we go to our favorite restaurant for dinner. I looked terrible and had no wish to go anywhere, but I wanted air, so I pulled myself together, dressed decently, and went with him.

He had reserved the table I loved, in the corner of the open restaurant near the beach. It was beautiful. When I sat down across from him and he looked into my eyes, the tears started again. He reached over, took my hand, and asked me to look at him. Then he said he would never leave me, that none of this was my fault, that if the diagnosis had been his instead of mine I would never have walked away from him. He told me it was alright, that we would face it together, that I was a good person and the best wife he could imagine, and that seeing me like this hurt him. He said he would do anything to make me happy and would stay with me through the hard parts, so we were going to get this depression out of me. He knew I had wanted to be a mother all my life and was sure I would be a wonderful one, and he reminded me there were children out there who needed parents like us. We could adopt, build a family, bring the joy back into the house. I sat there smiling with the tears still running down my face.

Within two months I was myself again. I accepted my condition and got on with living. Two years later we decided to adopt five children into our family, and those kids brought so much happiness into our home that I've never once looked back. It was one of the wisest choices I ever made.

- Anonymous Contributor