recovery, recovering, recovered?

This was a completely unplanned blog post, but I thought that it could possibly be useful for at least one person, so I hope you enjoy reading it, and please feel free to leave a comment on what you thought of it, or maybe a suggestion for a future post.



I started my recovery just over a year ago, and I didn't notice any changes or improvements for a very long time, so I felt like nothing was getting better. But I kept at it, with the hope that things would eventually get better... I'm so glad I didn't give up.

When I was at my worst, I took an online depression test to have an idea of how bad things were for me. A score of 54 or above indicated severe depression. I was at 87, and the highest possible score is 90, so you can understand that things were pretty bad for me. I was already diagnosed with severe depression at the time, and I know that the online test cannot diagnose me, I simply used it to see how I was doing.

I retook the test again today and got a score of 1. It would have been 0 if I slept like a normal person, but I spend much of the night awake or wake up very early, but I'm learning to work around this and use it to my advantage.

My score on the test left me with a simple statement saying that I 'seem to accept the ups and downs which are a part of normal everyday life', and I really think that is true. I am learning to cope more with happiness, and really enjoy it, and with sadness, and learn to work through it.


Some of you may be wondering how I was able to go from severe depression to 'depression unlikely' in a year and a bit, and to be completely honest, I'm not sure as I had been suffering with depression for a lifetime, so it wasn't an easy change, but I can guess:

• I escaped situations in which I was being hurt. For me, school was a huge problem because some people just suck, I won't go into detail. But now that I am away from them, and at college, I'm coping so much better.
• I have matured. I don't know whether this is due to me getting older, or due to me just figuring out that I have to learn to cope with things, but I have definitely matured, and so the way I deal with a negative situation is now so much better than is used to be. 
• I have removed negative influences from my life such as friends who I could never really consider to be friends. Doing this has made me feel a lot more free to be myself. 
• I now have a new focus, I'm focussing on my academic success rather than what's going wrong in my life. I am trying to make the most of the situations that I have, not feel bad about what's gone wrong. 
• But the factor that I think helped me to recover the most was my determination. I told myself I was going to recover. I told myself I wasn't going to give up. I told myself I was going to be happy, and so I have been working to achieve my goal from day one. It's not always been easy, but difficult does not mean impossible. I have changed my whole life around just so I can give myself the best opportunity to recover that I can. 

I don't consider myself to be 'recovered' yet. I still have a very long way to go, but I know that I am working in the right direction, and so I am proud of myself for what I am doing. And in case you're wondering, I feel fantastic. Instead of being shadowed by pain and mental torture, I'm now finding the light in almost everything I come into contact with. I never believed I would feel like this. But if I can get to where I am now after a lifetime to depression and other mental illnesses, anyone else can too. You just have to remind yourself what you're working for.

I'm sorry that this post has been unusual, but I just wanted to share some of my success with you all, because I think that it's important that someone is able to show people that recovery really does work, because I never had anyone to look up to when I first started. 

Have a wonderful day!