Losing My Father Caused My Depression

My depression started back in elementary school. I adored my father. Daughters often lean on their parents with a kind of open tenderness, and I was no exception. He was my hero and my closest friend, the person who encouraged me and the one I wanted to grow up to resemble. One detail stayed with me more than any other: the way he held a person's gaze when he spoke to them, steady and unhurried. Our home felt warm and mostly content during those early years. Then a car accident took him, and it broke something in me that took a long time to name.

With him gone, my mother had to go to work so she could keep us fed and housed. That moment, more than any single day of grief, is where the weight settled in and stayed.

In the months after his death, life felt emptied of any reason to keep going. I hurt in a way nobody around me seemed to register, not my friends and not my family. I still walked to school every morning, mostly to keep an eye on my brothers, but the days moved past me like something I was watching rather than living. I felt a little worse each morning. I started pulling away from people, inventing reasons not to see friends who kept inviting me out. Choosing to be alone was awful, and I knew it even then, yet I kept doing it. My grades slipped. My body shrank as the weight came off.

I scraped through high school and got into college, and the depression followed me into my first year.

I thought about telling my mom what was happening inside me more times than I can count. Each time, the fear stopped me: I pictured myself becoming one more problem she had to carry, so I said nothing. She was stretched thin as it was, holding the family together and getting me into school. Leaving home for college only widened the gap. I moved into a dorm where my roommates, for reasons I never understood, kept me at arm's length and seemed to resent me being there. I saw my mother roughly once a month, when she visited, or during breaks.

Money was tight for all of us. As the only earner, she poured herself into work and had nothing left over for the kind of unhurried time families need. I understood why. Understanding it did not make me feel any less alone. The one person I had ever handed my real feelings to was my father, and losing him left me convinced I could not do that with anyone else. On visits home I'd spend a short while with my brothers, then retreat from the closeness we used to share.

Around the time college had worn me down to near-complete isolation, a counseling group started up on campus, put together by a handful of senior students. My roommate had been going to their Wednesday meetings, and one week she asked if I wanted to tag along and meet the small circle of people who'd signed up.

At that first meeting, one of the members talked about the work he'd done to change how he carried himself. Something in me shifted while he spoke. After that I went every week without missing one, and I started to feel the pieces quietly settling back into place. The senior mentors made a point of sitting one-on-one with each member. Mine was a guy named Steve. We met for what was supposed to be a relaxed conversation, and before long I was telling him things I had never told anyone.

Steve saw the loneliness and the depression for what they were, and he walked me through small adjustments, one day at a time. My grades climbed. People noticed the change in me, and I began actually talking to my roommates instead of avoiding them. Sharing what was on my mind stopped feeling dangerous and started feeling good. I made it through to my senior year.

By then I'd cleared the hardest of my coursework, so I joined the group as a mentor myself, sitting with the younger students the way Steve had once sat with me. My brother started college around the same time, and I got to guide him too.

Life is wide, and whatever comes, each of us has a part to play. This life is short, so take what you can from it and look for small things that make you glad. If loneliness has you, seek out older people who can steer you and throw yourself into things that pull you out of your head. Think about the people who have less than you do, and remember how much you've already been given. - Charlie