About five years ago I used to have panic attacks whenever I met someone new or traveled too far apart from a loved one. I was convinced that they, or I, would die suddenly and just disappear. This fear started small, like an ache, when it felt like death was a plague dancing around my life randomly plucking people up right in front of me. The fear gradually grew to the point that it leaked in and out of my pores, infected my dreams, and made it impossible for me to feel normal. It was as if this fear took a match to the wicks of other smaller fears laying dormant inside of me, and before I knew it I was totally enveloped and completely out of control.

I decided the only way to regain that control was to escape. I had to do something completely foreign and prove that I wasn’t as tiny and fragile as this sadness was making me feel. So I moved to the Czech Republic and told myself that if I went away I could grow taller than the fear and I could walk away from it. I know how classic it is to go abroad and have some inexplicable life changing “a-ha” moment, but I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t exactly what happened. I found strength (and weakness) in myself that I never knew existed. I mixed myself up with this town and allowed myself to feel, and feel fully. I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world, but unfortunately running away from a problem doesn’t solve anything.

During my time in Prague I laughed with my whole body, I took pieces of my heart and planted them throughout the city, I fell deeply in love with life and a boy that kept me dizzy for a year and a half; but I held on to the sadness. It was smaller, like a little trinket from an overpriced gift shop. I kept it in a little drawer so I could pull it out and reminisce about our time together. The fucked up thing about depression is that it becomes a friend. It’s a little tchotchke that sucks to pack up and move from house to house, but you do it anyway because you just can’t seem to throw it away. After a while it began to grow again. It started with little things like bottles of wine and sad movies. Then it moved to screening all calls and text messages from loved ones because I just didn’t have the energy. This then slipped seamlessly into, for almost no reason at all, feeling totally alone and like everyone either didn’t care, or didn’t want to deal with the helpless little puddle I had melted myself into. It’s a perfect cycle of pushing people away and then wondering why no one is there to wipe your tears.

In the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly Golightly describes this enigma as the “mean reds”. They’re worse than the blues, she says, because the blues are when “you’re getting fat, and maybe it’s been raining too long you’re just sad that’s all. The mean reds are horrible, suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of”. Holly puts this feeling at ease with trips to Tiffany’s, whereas I stuck with the more classic routine of laying restlessly thinking about every terrible thing I’ve ever done or said to another human being. Or, my personal favorite, how the future is so terribly unpredictable that there really doesn’t seem to be a point in trying to steer this careening vehicle of destruction back to some sort of legitimate path. I would go on tirelessly playing out these scenarios until I eventually drifted off to sleep in bed, where I would remain until around two or three in the afternoon. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

For me, this didn’t happen all at once. It was always an ebb and flow of depression and “normalcy”. It remained something I could keep relatively private, slowly pushing friends and loved ones to an acceptable distance so I could wallow in peace. Last year I found myself alone in an empty house, in a town I hated, feeling like I was a character in a story someone else was writing for me. Every once in a while I would be laying in bed and a small pressure would wrap itself around me, like a hug that grew a little too tight and trapped me on my back. I would stare up and try and focus on a crack in the ceiling, halfway hoping/wondering when it would just open me up and take me away. I was living my life bouncing between hopeful and terrified that I would disappear in to thin air. In March I took a trip alone that empowered me and encouraged me to take ownership and control over my life.

Ever since I made that decision so many things have changed. I wish I could say I don’t have that trinket anymore, but I do and I think I always will. I can’t deny that part of myself because to deny it is to give it power. I acknowledge it, I accept it, and I have it out where I can see it. I still get anxious when I meet new people, but I push through it. I journal. I made new amazing friends, and I get out of bed when they call. I think about the future with hopeful anticipation. I don’t obsess over the “what if's" and “great unknowns" as much. I look at my boyfriend and I see someone who loves the person I am, who trusts me, and will be there without judgment when the mean reds have me laid out on the couch watching my tenth episode of Gray’s Anatomy in a row sobbing for no real reason at all. Most importantly I get up every morning and I see me. I see a strong and vulnerable woman with a purpose and a voice capable of writing her own story. It may be messy and filled with wrong turns and awkward first impressions, but it’s mine and I finally feel like I have the power to delight in it; which I didn’t realize is what was missing all along.