Nell and I have been on this journey since the day last year when she saw the I Am More exhibit in the mall and offered her unique perspective. And since then, not only did we birth a portrait and an essay, but also a baby! (I actually did nothing with that one) Iain described this portrait as cozy and comforting, and that’s how I see her family, supporting each other with love and laughter:

I first remember having problems with big, uncomfortable feelings in about second grade. I felt left out and not enough. The boys that I had crushes on appeared to not like me back, and as I moved on to middle school, I noticed with sadness that I was not being included by the popular girls. The popular girls didn’t make space for me at the lunch table or in their conversations. I studied what they did and said in hopes of cracking the code of popularity.  However, the harder I tried to make them like me, the less included I felt. The terms “wannabe” and “poser” were big in middle school. While I wanted to look and act like popular girls looked and acted, when I emulated them, I knew I risked being labeled as a “wannabe.”  That felt somehow worse.

I chose a third, though ultimately equally painful path, which was to isolate from everyone and wait until I could leave middle school and start over at a boarding high school.  By then, I knew that people used drugs and alcohol to escape sadness and find joy and excitement. I also knew that I needed to be wanted by boys – or girls – the more popular they were the better. Immediately in high school, I sought out opportunities to socialize with the kids who did drugs, and worked to constantly be involved with other people romantically, sexually, or both. Inevitably, the drug use led to disciplinary consequences and I was lucky to not be sent home.

My drug use steadily deepened my depression. This caught the attention of staff at school, who connected me with therapy and antidepressant medications. By the time spring came, I had met and became involved with a boy who wanted nothing to do with drugs and wanted me to have nothing to do with drugs or the people who sold them to me. For two years I played sports, studied hard, and became involved in lots of after-school activities. But it didn’t feel like enough. The sadness was still there, less angry and less painful, but it was there and it demanded a return to substance use. I started to live a double life. One clean, healthy-appearing public life with my boyfriend and “good” friend group, and then another where I was regularly abusing drugs and trying to capture the excitement and validation that I felt I was missing. I managed to graduate from high school, but just barely. The last month of high school was spent at an inpatient facility working to get off drugs and back onto the psychiatric medications I had stopped bothering to take.

After being discharged and following high school graduation, I swore off drugs.  However, in college, alcohol was everywhere.  I drank with increasing regularity. I managed to pass enough classes to stay in school, although it would take me 5.5 years to complete what was intended to be a 4-year program.

In my senior year, during a trip to the campus health center to meet with my psychiatrist, I passed by an office with a sign indicating that it belonged to the school’s substance abuse counselor. Impulsively, I knocked on the door and the counselor answered and made herself available. We talked for a while, and she encouraged me to attend the next AA group on campus. I did and started to develop friendships with students in recovery. I had several slips before I achieved long-term sobriety from drugs and alcohol, but continued to go to meetings, meet regularly with a sponsor, and work the 12 steps.

Always in therapy, always on psychiatric medication and usually attending meetings, I have managed in the years since to get married, earn my master’s degree in nursing, and become a mother. My depression and anxiety have never completely left. Even now, at age 42; I lapse into periods of depression that can keep me away from work for days or longer, barely able to attend to things like showering and brushing my teeth. I rely a lot on my husband during these times to take charge of childcare activities. My kids know about my depression and history of addiction. They know that the work I do as a psychiatric nurse practitioner is more than a means to pay for the things we need, but is also a way to help people struggling now in the ways I have. I am beyond grateful to my family, my friends, my clients, my sponsors, fellow 12-step members, my mental health team, and my higher power for helping me to stay afloat. I am not cured, but my life is beautiful, and I am able to know that beauty even when things are dark and I cannot clearly see it.