Summer 2015

I would like to start by apologising for not posting in so long.
I've been through quite a terrible depression relapse that I denied the existence of for a couple of months, and I have only just begun to claw my way out of it. I know that I'm not quite myself yet, but I'm beginning to feel glimmers of my 'happy' self coming through most days.
I can't believe that the last time I posted was at the beginning of July. So much has happened since then, which is exactly why I've been so vacant on here.
I spent my summer living at my sister's student house, which was filled with both joy and sadness. It was so exciting to move away from home and do things extremely independently, I was also boasting about how this would prepare me for University life, and in a way it did. However, by the end I started to feel low again without much internal explanation.
I knew that my mum didn't want me to leave her for the summer, but she let me anyway, and my dad was quite vacant in my life by this time, so my summer adventure started with a lift from my childhood best- friend, who drove the two hours to Leamington without hesitation. I was so ready to do this. The first month was very exciting, I handed out CVs on my first day there, and got a job straight away in a gorgeous cafe with lovely people. Steph (my sister) was working at wetherspoons and so worked odd shifts, which often left me alone for long periods of time, but I don't remember these being particularly bad. I always knew that she'd come home later and we'd enjoy ourselves together.
I then had to get another job because of my financial situation, which felt especially important with uni coming up. So I got an awful second job at a Morrison's cafe, which took away the magic of my summer. I started at 6.30 am, so had to wake up at 5.15 in a cold student house four days a week. The job itself was also completely unenjoyable. All the staff seemed to also hate their jobs there and my motivation was struggling. I wanted to call in sick everyday because the job made me sick of everything. This job lasted until September when I moved home, purely because of the financial gain.
I honestly don't know if it was good for me to live with Steph over the summer. I switched from thinking it was the best decision ever to wondering what it would have been like at home. It was what I wanted at the time, but I'm not sure if it was what I needed. I don't regret it, but I don't know whether it was the right choice.
I think what I was really doing was distracting myself. I could pretend again. I could pretend that my parents were still at home together and that things were still 'ok', which is always my initial reaction to bad things happening in my life. This is why I'm not sure whether moving out was the right thing to do for my emotional wellbeing. It was at the time, because I loved staying with Steph, but it then pushed back my inevitable breakdown to the first term of Uni, which is the least ideal time to plunge into a deep bout of depression.
What I really truly wanted out of my summer was for it to be like old summers, I wanted that continuity with everything else changing; but because everything else changed, there was no way that was going to stay the same. And I knew this, and I still know this now, but I still yearn for the impossible- which has both beneficial and destructive sides to it (which I'll explain in a different post, because it's quite a complicated topic for me). All I wanted was to stay at home with Steph, 'wasting' the day with junk food, awful tv and cuddling Teddy (my pet bunny). But I soon realised that this was never going to happen again, and 'never going to happen again's were what brought on this depression relapse.
I was just trying to cling on to the last pieces of my childhood, but I can't ever get them back now. And realising this has brought back a lot of the same feelings that I had after previous events, like my cancer diagnosis.
My whole world changed again. And it's taken me a long time to deal with it, but I'm really trying and really hoping that with my knowledge I have gained from therapy I can deal with it better this time. Even if my depression relapse tries to convince me otherwise.

Sophie xo