Honestly, I realized I had (mild) depression after I “got better” (for lack of better wording).
When I started college, I was around more minorities, I started wearing a headscarf, and I started to feel more confident to be me. I had less social anxiety (even though I still have huge problems with that). Once I gained confidence in myself, i guess I just started feeling happier to be living my life.
I realized that being sad as a teen and hopeless about life might have been “teenage hormones” but it also might have been due to the fact that I wasn’t around the right people.
At my high school, people all had to be the same. Wearing the same clothes, talking the same way, etc. Thats kinda hard to do when you have thick curly brown hair instead of straight blonde hair, or have tan skin instead of lighter skin. Nothing against them, but I was always left out by some of them, and it led to a lot of self esteem issues.
Talking shit to myself. It was an early sign that I completely ignored and didn’t get treated for for years.
I thought I was just being a successful person. I wanted to do well in life so I was hard on myself to keep myself on track. When I didn’t live up to the standards I set for myself I beat myself up for it, because of course that’s what you do. If you don’t have high expectations for yourself then you must be some sort of soft special snowflake who wants the world to have the world slow down for them instead of rising to the occasion. Right?
It wasn’t until my life went to total shit that I had a therapist tell me to give myself a fucking break already. What I was doing wasn’t helping me and was hurting my relationships with people and my health.
When I realized I wasn’t really feeling anything anymore. The first time it hit was when my grandpa died. I remember talking to my mom on the phone, she is bawling, and I literally didn’t feel a thing about it. Still don’t, and haven’t really felt genuine/lasting emotion for anything in quite a while now.
It always starts with me wanting to be alone and losing interest in things and people around me. Also sleeping a lot.
Loosing interest/ lack of motivation