I’ve been feeling really bitter lately.

I’ve been feeling this way ever since I visited Arizona and saw all the wonderful things my friends have been up to. I saw my boyfriend excelling in summer school, I saw one of my best friends on her way to the study-abroad program of her life, and of course, every single one of my friends had stellar GPAs.

Yes, it seems like everyone else is doing something great and worthwhile with their summer, except me. And I can’t tell you how sad and pathetic that makes me feel.

But there’s another emotion in there that I wasn’t expecting. Anger. I’m angry! I am actually angry at my circumstances, full of energy for the first time in years, and ready to go and do and learn. That’s how I know I’m getting better.

I will be completely frank with you. Sophomore year, for me, was a bust. My grades were dismal, my health even worse. Unfortunately I wasn’t sick with anything awe-inspiring and likely to garner sympathy and understanding. I was simply depressed.

Ah, depression. Something I have far too much experience with, both in myself and in others, and something that 90% of this blog is about. I’ve had to tell my boyfriend this, I’ve had to tell my parents, I even had to tell Dean Hutch and my major advisor, that depression is a real thing, and no, I’m not taking these pills for fun, and no, I am not doing this for attention, and no, I am not lazy, I literally, physically cannot get out of bed.

One time I screamed and dropped something when someone startled me, and when they started laughing, I burst into tears. Another time, when a friend of mine briefly lost his temper, I spent the next three hours huddled in my bed, shaking. I slept all day and took my meals upstairs so I wouldn’t have to socialize. And then, sometime around my twentieth birthday, I realized this isn’t normal. Or healthy. I guess I’d kind of just been waiting for things to get better, but my GPA was in danger and my life was on the line and nothing had gotten any better at all. So I went to the doctor, like I should have done last August.

It took a few weeks for the new drugs to kick in enough that I had the energy to pay attention in class. It took even longer for my mood to level out sufficiently enough for me to stop crying in public.

And tonight, a full two months after I began taking the new medicine, I was faced with a simply awful situation, one that would normally have made me sad for a week. But tonight I became angry instead. Angry at the unfairness of the situation. Angry at the person who caused it. I had stopped feeling helpless and started feeling righteous.

3-chloro-N-tert-butyl-β-ketoamphetamine (bupropion for short) is the fourth most commonly prescribed antidepressant in the United States. Opponents of antidepressants will say that they provide a “false happiness” or “chemical high” and don’t fix the underlying problem, to which I have two rebuttals:

• Depression is a chemical illness. You wouldn’t say a person with Addison’s had “false hormones”. That makes about as much sense as calling someone with well-controlled depression “falsely happy”; i.e. none.
• Why don’t you go tell someone who has no energy to move or even eat that “it’s all in your head! You just need some counseling!” and tell me how well that works out for you. Antidepressants get you out of bed. They make you able to eat, bathe, and work. They get you out of that dark scary place where even the basics of living are pointless and too difficult. Counseling is like the icing on a cupcake. It’s nice to have and all, but antidepressants make you able to go to counseling.

Having the capacity for anger and the ability to aspire to anything beyond simply surviving is new to me and quite frankly I don’t know what to do with this newfound energy. I’ve thrown myself into writing, crafting, learning biochem, and working online. I am learning to eat better and take care of my body and especially to be more understanding and polite towards my friends. You could describe me during my months-long illness with a lot of words and one of them would most definitely be needy.

Every day now, when I wake up, I tell myself that I am smart and good and getting stronger every day. I printed out a list of my accomplishments and put it on my nightstand so I can look at it when I’m feeling sad. I know that I had a bad year last year but I also know that things will get better, and they already are.

You know what I did this summer? I got my dreams back.

And I really don’t think that’s pathetic at all.