My Story

Hi. Hi everyone. My name is Tara and I'm going to share my story with whoever wants to read it.

I'm a 13 year old girl. My parents are wonderful, but busy all the time. My mom's a doctor and my dad works at a big company. I'm alone a lot. I got diagnosed with social anxiety. I had such severe anxiety that I started skipping lunch to avoid being near people and/or sitting alone and being shamed. This developed into full blown anorexia, and I started skipping all my other meals. This continued for a long time till I came clean to my parents. Well, not exactly. One day I just collapsed due to dehydration and malnutrition. I ended up in the ER. I have worked so hard to make sure it never happens again. I had to rebuild my diet and start eating.

And wait. That's not all. I also got diagnosed with separation anxiety which led to severe panic attacks. It was terrible. I had just started at my new school. I have a therapist, though. I see her thrice a week. Anyways. Panic attacks. So I was so wracked with nerves all the time. And then the depression started. I began losing feeling. Like I couldn't think of the last time I was happy. I couldn't think of anything I was good at. Positivity slowly wormed its way out of my life and this disease crept in. My parents took me to a doctor and I was diagnosed with clinical depression. I take medication for it every day. It's getting better but not so much. Another thing that happened was that I started SHing before my parents helped me. For a while I sneaked Ibuprofen (a pain killer) from the medicine cabinet because I wanted to feel numb. I don't know when it started. It's all blurry for me.

I joined 7Cups this year. It's helping, because I find a community of people who understand and care. I still get so angry at things. People (not my parents though) tell me I should be happy with what I have because my parents make a lot of money and I'm fortunate with other aspects of my life. What they don't understand is that depression is not a choice. It's not drama. It's not something that modern people have just generated for their own purposes. It's an illness. It's a poison. It's a disease that twists you from the inside out, tears you down, builds you back up just to break you from the inside again. It's no more than a simple chemical imbalance in your body. But it's much more than that.

And I will never forget what it did to me.