I had gone off the deep end, not that I fully realised it at the time. I'd become chronically depressed and due to my illness my perception of the world had changed. This wasn't something that happened overnight, it was a slow-growing parasite that only fully took hold at the beginning of 2003.
Now because I didn't know the first thing about depression and its debilitating effects, I honestly thought that I was going crazy. I no longer recognised the woman staring back at me in the mirror. I didn't recognise her way of thinking, her instabilities or her insecurities. These things were all new to me.
I did however know one thing for sure, that there was something definitely wrong with me. I just didn't know what it was, and that was the scariest thing of all. When a doctor told me that I was depressed my first instinct was to shake my head in disbelief. I'm a strong person who has surmounted every obstacle thrown my way. Surely, I can't be depressed!
That one little word kept coming back to haunt me until I eventually looked it up online and was amazed to discovered that actually I was, in no uncertain terms, depressed. This was not a turning point for me, which it should have been, but somewhere deep inside me I simply refused to believe what was right there in front of me.
I spent a long time raging against this new person I hardly knew and even more time trying to find the person I'd lost. None of which was constructive...