I hope this is OK to share here. I struggled massively from about the age of 12 with severe depression. Medicated, suicidal, self harming, tonnes and tonnes of therapy... I spent my teens and early 20s utterly miserable. Recovery has been so slow that i think i almost didnt notice it happening. I came off medication to have DD and was pleasantly surprised to find i coped OK with low moods and was able to manage my anxiety pretty well. I sort of put it down to hormone changes in pregnancy and was too busy to think about it much.
Last night on the drive home from work a song came on the radio that was one i used to listen to a lot as a teen. I had one of those weird waves of nostalgia for those times (even though they sucked) and then there was this bizarre moment of incredible clarity, where I realised that when i used to listen to this song, i truly wanted to die, and I haven't felt like that in years.
I had to pull the car over, and i sat there on the verge in the dark and sobbed like a baby. If you'd told teen me she'd be alive at 28, she'd have called you a liar. My life was so endlessly bleak and hopeless and it got better so gradually over so many years that i basically didn't really notice. Like the reverse of a frog in boiling water.
Has this happened to anyone else? I guess I'd always sort of thought of recovery as more of a momentus change, a switch flip that you definitelty couldn't miss. Which, now i think about it, is pretty naive. Maybe that's a feature of teen depression? That you can just sort of grow out of it if you're lucky?