The Day I Discovered Me

I write not as someone who has great academic merits bestowed on her but as a humble, fragile girl, who for most of her life has struggled with self-love. This deficiency has taken me to many dark places. It has caused me to act out of fear and make decisions that are fear-based instead of making ones which were right and that caused me to experience many chaotic moments. This lack of self-love has led me to pursue one-sided love affairs because I felt that I was not able to be loved on my own merit because there really wasn't anything special about me, so I had to buy love and work very hard at trying to make people love me.

I became a people-pleaser quite early in life and no was not a word that was found in my vocabulary because I just had to have everyone loving me or I just could not go on if they didn't. I loved hard and put every nerve and fibre and sinew in the relationship and because I did not realise my worth I compromised myself in so many ways and so many times over a period of ten years that at the end I did not even know who I was. I could not identify the girl staring at herself helplessly in the bathroom mirror because I was now bits and pieces of everyone I had allowed to use me over a long period of time. I did not know who I was anymore. I had delved into a toxic and dysfunctional habit of letting a man who did not genuinely love me into my life over and over again, each time the pain worsening on his departure.

It happened on this last occasion where I was so brutally mistreated and disrespected that I realised that I had to gain control over my life and truly assess the way I had allowed what I thought was love to drag me into the pit of hell. It was actually right there, perched in the little corner of hell that was reserved for me, a familiar territory actually that I realised how beautiful and genuine a soul I was and that it was time for me to start loving myself with the same unconditional love that I so freely give to others. Has it been easy? No, but each day I wake up with a resolve to break myself free from the pain of childhood trauma that I had allowed to seep into my adult life. I wake up determined that no matter how dark some days are that I am going to work on loving every part of me, even the parts which are not so pretty because they are a part of me and I have to accept that and work on my deficiencies and weaknesses. Self- love, it had been a long time in the making but now I truly see how important it is that you love yourself passionately and deeply or otherwise we run ourselves in the trouble of leading a life that is half-lived.

Whatever obstacles there are that need to be removed have to be removed with the conviction that your heart and mind need to know. No more playing small. Chin up and face the world with a smile that heals the pieces of your broken soul and maybe just maybe might help another soul to make that step live their best life now.

Depressed, anxious, pain-stricken, those are words that have been used in collusion with my name for the last fifteen years or so. Did I choose to suffer from this ghastly and paralytic illness... no, but what I have endeavoured to do is to share with others how I have overcome this illness which at one point caused me to lose everything that I held dear and sacred to me. It is my wish that persons who are suicidal or are chronically depressed from the pain that life throws their way at times will realise that they are not alone and there truly are souls who understand the measure of suffering and anguish they have to live through on a daily basis.

Although utterly broken and scarred, the time is now ripe to embrace all the happiness that life can afford even on the days when everything that is dark and ugly is hurled at you. I am Shelly-ann, a girl living with depression who is on a mission to help others struggling with this illness as I travel on the path that will take me to the place where I am healed of all the things which once scarred my soul.