I was talking to someone at work today and had a bit of a lightbulb moment. She was telling me how her teens and twenties had been ruined by her mother’s death. My colleague was 14 at the time, and she said it wasn’t until her early 30s that she began to deal with it.
I’d never really thought about it before, but a similar thing happened to me. I didn’t experience anything as awful as a parent’s death, but my teens and 20s were ruined by a series of mini traumas. First of all there was my parent’s divorce when I was 12. After that, my father re-married, had a child with his new wife and sort of drifted away. To finish things off, I was savagely bullied for the final three years of secondary school. Looking back, I think the combination of those three things caused a mild, low level depression that dogged me until I was well into my 30s. I’m so much happier now. And like my colleague I think it’s because the cloud that formed in my early teens has finally gone. Can anyone relate?