From Being Depressed to Shining Bright

I used to feel like I was nothing. If you read my work consistently… this may come as a surprise to you. To the untrained eye… I seem like a very positive and happy person. Hard to picture me feeling low and depressed. However, even the happiest person you’ve ever met has had that feeling a time or two.

I used to be treated like garbage. People would throw used tampons at me in class, throw my schoolbooks into toilets and call me every horrible name you can think of. (And some you can’t). I would come home crying every day and for a long time… my only friend was my mother.

I would be afraid to walk home from school at the risk of being jumped or tormented. Which happened quite a bit. I started to dress like a boy to avoid comments on my clothes, that apparently weren’t in style or expensive enough. I was sad… all the time. At the age of 15 I even started cutting my arm and wearing a sweat arm band in hopes of covering my shame.

It didn’t work. They found that too… Just another thing to make fun of.

I had four very good friends. One that I still talk to on a daily basis today and the other three I converse with still from time to time. They were my angels.

Shiny things.

Being depressed made me even more depressed. Crazy right?

I would get depressed about being depressed which would, in turn, make me even more depressed. I suppose that’s why depression is so difficult to handle without therapy and medication for some. I would look in the mirror and cry, sing myself depressing music and write letters to my friends or my sister begging them to teach me to be popular.

My father even found one at one point… and made fun of a sentence in it.

“My life is a total blur.”

That was the sentence. Rather than comforting me and reassuring me that I was not alone… he yelled at me for what I wrote and sent me to my room. To this day, I don’t think he knows how much that made my feelings worsen.

Now, here’s the part I’m sure you’ve all been hoping for…

The change

There has to be one, of course. It would be weird if there wasn’t since I’m such a chipper ball of fluff today. Filled with positive energy, happy thoughts and reminders to Shine Bright.

One day, after my divorce from my first husband.. yup, it took me 3 years after high school to have my turn around… I woke up to my son screaming, in an apartment complex filled with drug dealers and ex-cons… I realized I had much more from life that I wanted. I was denying myself the ability to gain those things due to feeling sorry for myself. And for what? For people that I haven’t seen or spoken to in years? It made no sense to me.

I sat at my kitchen table with my then six-month-old son in his bouncer and wrote out a plan —

• Get a better job.

• Move to a safer location.

• Take control of my life.

• Shine bright.

A small but powerful list. It gave me more pride to look down upon those words than I had gotten from anything or anyone in a very long time. I finally understood that in order to have the life I wished for... It was me who would have to accept and love me. Everyone else in the world didn’t matter. They were there, but one day they would be gone. The only one that would be left…. was me.

For years... I worked on myself. How I viewed myself, how I took care of myself and focused on the things that made me happy. Regardless of what anyone thought. Sure, I lost some friends and family along the way, but I continued to remind myself that in the end… it was me who I needed to care about.

Today

I sit behind this computer a changed woman. A woman following her dreams and views of the world. Giving her unpopular opinions and consistently reminding herself, and everyone around her to Shine Bright.

🧡 Shine Bright, Kayla