Undergraduate /
'Best motivation and depression' - my enemy had turned into my motivator. [3]
Hi please comment on my essay - the topic, writing, sentence structure, grammar, etc. Thanks!
Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud, and how does it relate to the person you are?
Happiness, sadness, confusion, anger, annoyance, hatred - I could not 'switch off' these emotions nor dampen the intensities of them. They seemed to have lives of their own; lives which were beyond my mind's control. Six impish devils trying to tear me apart. The psychological pain morphed into physical torment: fingernails cutting into skin, leaving red and bloody trails; knuckles bruised and swollen after meeting a concrete wall multiple times.
Death was suddenly found hiding in every shadow in my life. I stared mindlessly at the open windows, trying to figure out if my body would reach terminal velocity before I hit the ground if I were to fall out of these windows 'accidentally'. I watched cars zoom past me like wishing stars. I wished I could be killed by a moving vehicle. Then I remembered that I should not drag others into my agony by condemning them to an identity: 'murderer'. So I stuck to watching windows.
I lost weight. My grades dropped. I lost interest in life. I was depressed. I managed to keep up my façade, no one found out.
I turned to my best friend for help. She tried and failed. In the end, she recommended a psychiatrist and turned her back on me. I fell deeper into the pit less hole. I was now alone, with a psychiatrist's name card.
I later found out that she rattled me out to my mother. Great, it was the last thing that I wanted - to disappoint my mother. Window staring was officially declared as my all-time-favourite hobby, closely followed by self-harming acts. Strangely enough, I never dared to cut myself.
The nights were endless. The days were filled with pain and suffering. Time could not have moved any slower. And yet it was only two weeks of such agony.
My mother was tactful; she never confronted me directly about this issue. But after much deliberation, I told my mother. I completely and utterly broke down. I cried buckets of tears and so did she. Asian parents are not into hugging; I never got a hug from her.
I went to the psychiatrist once. She prescribed me two weeks of mild anti-depressants to help me sleep and hopefully feel better. I took seven pills and stopped. They never worked. I never went back to the doctor again.
My mother talked to me twice about the depression. She tried to relieve me of any unnecessary stress that she may have placed on me or I on me. She felt guilty that her expectations could have stifled me and triggered this incident. The more she tried to assure me that my best was enough, the more I felt that I could not disappoint her. But this time, this gargantuan expectation triggered happy hormones in my body. I allowed myself another three days to mope around and then after that I had to prepare to pick myself up to defeat depression.
And that is what I did. I was motivated to be the best that I can be. I kept reminding myself how stupid and foolish I would be if I died out of cowardice and never be able to know how much I can achieve. I have already achieved so much, my future would be even better. I pulled myself out of the seemingly pit-less hole, using the exact same factor that had gotten me into this situation. All because my mind was cleared; my enemy had turned into my motivator.