Remembering how to adult without fear

About 2 months ago I was diagnosed with depression and low self-esteem. By diagnosed I mean that I explained my thoughts and behavioural patterns to my therapist, Sarah, a lovely woman, and she confirmed what I’d suspected for about 2 years, if not longer. Admitting that I was depressed was harder than talking about how deep in my shell I’d crawled in order to protect myself from being hurt and abandoned and criticised by other people, when my only crime had been to be open and honest to people; and not censoring the often conflicting (in terms of my gender and what people expected of me) aspects of my personality.

Me, personally, I never thought that a 22-year-old woman with a considerably feminine figure (36 DD, small waist, fertile hips) was forbidden from playing MMORPG’s and be vocal about it; or that she wasn’t “normal” (for Pete’s sake, who IS normal anyway?) for preferring comfortable, loose clothing and skateboarding trainers, which, if you ask me, should be the first thing shops should sell, but what do I know? I’m tall for my height (1.63m), I enjoy body modifications and with 11 piercings (at one point I had 16 live piercings and in total, I have pierced my body 20 times) and 5 tattoos, you’d think I’d be used to being looked down on and thought of as a freak.

My real life started when I first moved to Washington, Tyne and Wear in late September 2014. Before that I lived the student life in Heaton: I woke up, went to college, went to work, came home, ate pizza in front of the laptop screen and slept. I was content with my life and was quite the animated young person, always up for an impromptu night out, always on the move, always up to something. To sum it up, I didn’t have a care in the world. I was in a long distance relationship at the time, me in England and him in Greece, but I was getting bored waiting for him to make a move up in Scotland, which was our agreement. I had already been flirting with several people for several months when, in January 2014 I met, through some mutual friends, my Chewy and it was love at first sight. We were so compatible it was almost too good to be true and after four months of pretending to the Greek Guy that our nearly four years of relationship was still going strong, my secret came out and I was finally free to follow my heart and be with Chewy.

Mind you, I didn’t return to college after the Easter holidays because I realised I preferred spending time with Chewy and I was slowly becoming disillusioned with tertiary education. So, I quit college and me and Chewy started looking for a place to live together in. We agreed that moving closer to his work, an ASDA warehouse, made more sense than not, because I was on a zero-hour contract to Subway sandwiches and, well, I was too optimistic, I suppose. After finding a semi-terraced house and moving in, I proceeded to look for work in the surrounding area, mindless jobs that would give me money that I could spend to make me and Chewy happy. Well, that plan backfired.

I found work at the local Empire Cinemas, on a zero-hour contract, with the false promise that I would stay on for longer than Christmas. That was the beginning of my downfall. To cut a long story short, people were very superficial and suspicious of me in there. Whenever I would try to make idle conversation with a colleague, they would answer without giving much room for a response and if there was someone else around, they would direct their attention to them, making me feel unworthy of their attention and isolated from their clique. This “clique” did include people from my group of newbies, so when I next had a work assessment meeting with the general manager, I expressed my concerns. His response was not comforting: “You need to prove to people that you are here to stay. People aren’t just going to open up to you because you might not be here tomorrow.” SPOILER ALERT: We will, we will SACK YOU! This sentiment was echoed when a few weeks later I was chatting to a couple of managers that seemed to like me more: “We only contacted you because a more likely candidate dropped out.” Gee, cheers mate, I apologise for wanting to work for you and make you money. So, shortly after Christmas, they sacked me for misreading the rota photo they put up on the Facebook community board, AKA the page where you could swap shifts, pretend that you love your work, etc. What total BOLLOCKS that was, there is nothing fun about hearing the same playlist three times over per shift (the Indiana Jones theme will never sound the same), or when FUCKING IDIOTS upend buckets of popcorn and mix up their tentacles and their milkshake falls on top of that and it is up to YOU to fucking clear up the disgusting conglomerate of soggy popcorn and sticky, half-dried milkshake off the fucking carpet. Oh, and DISGUSTING CREATURES WHO LEAVE CHEWING GUM ON THE CARPET. Fuck my life!

Needless to say, Christmas 2014 was as fun as playing the violin with an arm broken in three places. Chewy was sympathetic, told me I could take as much time as I needed to recover from the blow (I had never been fired before), supported my offensive language towards my former employer, helped me pick up my pieces and glue my pride back together. I applied for a, surprise surprise, zero-hour contract job at my local Domino’s Pizza, thinking that going back into fast food, back into American fast food chains, would sort me out. I was very wrong.

In February 2015, I got a job at my local Domino’s. The day I had my interview, I’d left the house after a disagreement with Chewy. I managed to put all of my shit in the box and nail my interview. The manager who interviewed me was leaving her job right after my recruitment, which is important for the rest of my story, because she was the only female senior member of staff. GET THIS. ONLY ONE FEMALE SENIOR MEMBER OF STAFF. Working for Domino’s sucked the life out of me. I met indifference and chauvinism in every turn, was ignored when I tried to make small talk, or even tried to join in conversations. The few members of staff who talked to me, seemed unwilling to do so and uncomfortable to hear me talk about the SAME things that the men would talk about, that is video games and violent tv programmes. At that time I had a shoulder-length dreadhawk with an undercut, so I suppose some of the older fellows may have been intimidated by such an unusual “bird”, as men often call women in the northeast. I did expect younger folks not to care, though, but I was wrong. From February 2015 to December 2016 I was trapped in that job, my mood slipping that little bit more with every passing day, with my self-esteem following suit.

It was the year 2015, after a couple of months at Domino’s that I decided that I wasn’t going to last very long in that job and that now was as good a time as any to restart my university education and carve myself and Chewy a better life. I enrolled with the same college as two years prior, on a similar Access to Higher Education pathway, signed the same shitty pieces of paper, promised myself and Chewy that I would get it right this time. I was desperate for a boost, something to help me get out of that bottomless pit of despair and hopelessness and pointlessness (which, in retrospect is the big, bad wolf and her name is Depression) and that soul-destroying feeling of isolation and uselessness that I was feeling. Chewy was doing all that he could to make me feel better, he was never the problem, I was never the problem, it was, in fact, my workplace that was the rot eating away at me. And I was in complete denial about how negatively my last two jobs had affected me, doggedly working a job that was transforming me into a ghastly, distorted, miserable shadow of my true self. College, if anything,exacerbated my already declining mental health.

Deadlines, socialising, exams, lessons, talking in class, talking to people, all of these used to be in my comfort zone. Deadlines and exams weren’t in my Top 5 Favourite Aspects of Education, but I had dealt with them confidently in the past. Well, this time round, it was a bloody effort to wake up in the morning and make a coffee, let alone put clothes on and travel for over 45 minutes to a bland building with windowless classrooms and no blankets to hide under. I must admit that I had given up by February, but I carried on doggedly (key word, I suppose), even signing Extenuating Circumstances forms, citing Generalised Anxiety Disorder as the extenuating circumstance, just so I could keep up the pretenses that I was a thriving student, who needed extra time because she had to edit things out of her essays. BOLLOCKS. I needed the extra time to find the motivation to write something more than just the essay title. (Note to self: I am an easily motivated person if I want to do something. Depression makes me forget that.) Depression sucks. I will finish this essay in another time, because I have to go buy some onions for the pasta sauce. Might get some chicken too.

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