What is fear? Fear is realizing, shivering in the corner of a frozen prison, that you've built yourself an elegant castle of ice but forgot to install a door. For a while i was content with the numbness, the frostbitten fingers, the icy plumes of breath curling around my face. I had submitted to my frigid self-incarceration; i was its melancholy inmate, queen of bones and frost and misery. This was my depression, and it was all-consuming. For five years, this was my reality––that is, until I decided I'd weathered enough snow storms for a lifetime.
I spent my first twelve years on this earth in Seattle, Washington, notorious for its perpetual drizzle and significant lack of vitamin D in all its inhabitants. I had a happy childhood despite my …show more content…
I was 2,826 miles from my mom and everything else familiar. It was a culture shock to say the least––I was greeted by unfamiliar heat, conservatism, and Lilly Pullitzer galore. This is where the seed of sadness planted deep inside me as a child began to germinate. Heat dissipated into a chilly, dead scenery as I began to starve myself the winter of seventh grade, when, unbeknownst to me at the time, Seasonal Affective Disorder reared its mangled head for the first time. I descended into a dank cellar of solitude, where I dipped my toe into the icy infinity that is clinical depression. Chilling as it was, it filled an aching hole that I couldn't seem to fill with anything else––and thus started my waltz with …show more content…
It was here that I found myself quaking from fear and frostbite in my frozen prison that I was getting awfully tired of. With my last bit of strength, I mustered the courage to begin to chisel myself free of my self-inflicted world if ice. Slowly but surely, I chipped away a hole big enough to shimmy through and stumbled into the twilight, a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Recovery was twice as hard as the depression itself, and I remained in this twilight until very recently, when I finally managed to stumble back into the light after what seemed like an eternity of wandering through the cold in a nearly delirious stupor, drunk with sadness. The maturity, insight, and resilience I gained from my battle with despondency was unrivaled––I emerge on the other end equipped with everything I could need to live freely, love blindly, and appreciate and experience life like the quavering, wild flame it is. I've looked death in the eye, and laughed at him when everything seemed to crumble around me. I am a phoenix, rising from the ashes of existential crises, self hatred, and chemical imbalances, no longer that frail sparrow or matriarch of ice, but queen of the sky, ready to blaze my own trail through the endless blue
I spent my first twelve years on this earth in Seattle, Washington, notorious for its perpetual drizzle and significant lack of vitamin D in all its inhabitants. I had a happy childhood despite my …show more content…
I was 2,826 miles from my mom and everything else familiar. It was a culture shock to say the least––I was greeted by unfamiliar heat, conservatism, and Lilly Pullitzer galore. This is where the seed of sadness planted deep inside me as a child began to germinate. Heat dissipated into a chilly, dead scenery as I began to starve myself the winter of seventh grade, when, unbeknownst to me at the time, Seasonal Affective Disorder reared its mangled head for the first time. I descended into a dank cellar of solitude, where I dipped my toe into the icy infinity that is clinical depression. Chilling as it was, it filled an aching hole that I couldn't seem to fill with anything else––and thus started my waltz with …show more content…
It was here that I found myself quaking from fear and frostbite in my frozen prison that I was getting awfully tired of. With my last bit of strength, I mustered the courage to begin to chisel myself free of my self-inflicted world if ice. Slowly but surely, I chipped away a hole big enough to shimmy through and stumbled into the twilight, a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Recovery was twice as hard as the depression itself, and I remained in this twilight until very recently, when I finally managed to stumble back into the light after what seemed like an eternity of wandering through the cold in a nearly delirious stupor, drunk with sadness. The maturity, insight, and resilience I gained from my battle with despondency was unrivaled––I emerge on the other end equipped with everything I could need to live freely, love blindly, and appreciate and experience life like the quavering, wild flame it is. I've looked death in the eye, and laughed at him when everything seemed to crumble around me. I am a phoenix, rising from the ashes of existential crises, self hatred, and chemical imbalances, no longer that frail sparrow or matriarch of ice, but queen of the sky, ready to blaze my own trail through the endless blue