Thanks, Wants2fly for your interest in my life. :-)

Alright... well, first comes first... you need a little more of my background info to understand. This is going to be super-super long. bare with me.

I suffered with depression for a very long time... i think i remember it first really hitting me in 6th grade. As long as i can remember i was physically abused... and emotionally and mentally as i mentioned before. Those situations were really tough for me. At times i was suicidal, and was a very frequent self-injurer.

Eventually, things with my parents settled down... when i grew older, when i grew to have more freedom and didn't have to fight for it anymore. That was my sophomore year of high school.

I had done pretty poorly in school for awhile. In the beginning of middle school, i would get on the honor roll all the time. slowly my academics declined as my depression increased. when things started getting betting my sophomore year, i started doing a little better in school again. that summer i built myself up to have motivation for school and for everything. i pushed everything that had happened to me out of my head.

the first few weeks of my junior year i did well. Then Evan came along. that situation is way too long to really explain in detail. He gained my trust, he was the only person who could make things make sense to me in my life... here's an example: he could make things click in my head. he told me i was beautiful so many times... i asked him to stop, but he kept telling me until i broke down. once i broke down, i had no emotional strength left to disagree with him. i was putty.

he knew me better than i knew myself. and he got in my head... i could consider the things my parents said about me to be ******** when people on the outside world disagreed and held me on this pedestal i was always on. Evan took all the things he knew affected me from what my parents had done, and broke me to a point my parents were never able to. it was psychological torture.

Another guy came along... Ed. Ed became the reason i lived... only because i knew he loved me. even when i hated myself more than anyone could imagine... i couldn't consider killing myself having him... i loved him.... i was in love.

my depression continued. my self-injury continued. he was the only thing that held me together.

we lasted for about a year. at the end of our relationship, i was nearly delusional. i was too needy for him... i would cling to him, and he would push away. the more he pushed away the more i clung... and sometimes i doubted he cared. finally he dumped me... on christmas. i lost a total of 20 pounds (in the span of a couple months; from a month before the end, to a month after the end of the relationship.... from 134 down to 114, at 5'4") and we got back together about a week after christmas. we broke up again a couple weeks later, for the final time.

during the first time when we were broken up, he said maybe it might only be a break (because i was begging him not to breakup with me) but that if i cut at all, we couldn't get back together. so i did the hardest thing id ever done... i didn't cut. during that week alone i lost 10 pounds. the anxiety was the most excruciating experience of my entire life. (anxiety is different from depression, where you sink into depression and may feel a bit of relief, anxiety keeps you on edge... and the INTENSITY of that anxiety... it was far far far far more excruciating than any of my depression had ever been.)

a few weeks later the weirdest thing happened. i slept over a girlfriend's house, and there were a few of us... and one friend, made note of my "laziness" and about how my "laziness" was why i did poorly in school...

and something snapped in me. she obviously didn't understand me..... and finally i realized..... Ed had. Ed had understood who i was. At times when i gave into the thought of "i'm a failure because i'm lazy" Ed reminded me of who i was... he reminded me that i had more will power than anyone he knew, but that i used my will power keeping myself alive, and sane, and to keep up my facade. He believed in me. He believed in my potential. One time he had a dream about me... in the dream, I graduated from college number 3 out of a class of 600. When he told me that dream, i cried. it gave me hope for my future.

Also, at that time, my high school had a Winter Concert in february (i am very involved in music. i am now a music major in college) february 10th would have been our 1 year anniversery, and the concert was on the 11th. I had a solo song, that i had chosen while me and Ed were going out... Valentine by Martina McBride... and i got up there and before i started i said, "Though the words should not still apply, the dedication still does. Thank you for everything."

I sang the song without breaking into tears. afterwards, i got off stage and fell into the arms of a friend, and bawled. The amount of praise and support i got after i did that song was amazing. I had friends telling me i was their hero... because they knew how hard that was for me... and how hard my life had been... and how hard the breakup had been for me.

So i realized Ed understood me, and believed in me. I realized my friends cared about me. I realized what they said was true... that I was an amazingly strong person. I had lost 20 pounds... i finally had the PERFECT body!!! I was finally attractive. People would always come up to me and tell me how good i looked... they would tell me i was glowing. And i was determined not to let Ed's belief in me be in vain. Even if he wasn't in a position anymore to be any influence on me, even if he didn't give a damn, I wasn't going to let him down. For the first time in my entire life... I finally had a future.

I wrote an entry in my livejournal shortly after that saying simply, "He made me me, and when he left I was still me. I hope I can repay him someday."

Falling in love saved my life. But oddly enough, it was the end of that love that saved me. Everything that could have possibly happened, happened at exactly the precisely right moment for everything to click.

Ya know... i've still had some tough times in my life... (the occasional incident with my parents... one of which landed me with a concussion... and i did have one other mildly abusive boyfriend...) but i have the capacity to deal with these situations without becoming anguished the way i used to. from those things i got occasional anxiety in the weeks and maybe a month or two right after, but the effects were so minimal compared to what they might have been before everything clicked and i became normal.

For months after that initial click i was absolutely ecstatic. i was overjoyed to be alive all the time. that was a really heavenly experience... but eventually i leveled off. i think maybe i was so ecstatic all the time because happiness was such a DRASTIC change from how my life had been for as long as i could remember. I was so happy all the time, that i could get away with less sleep... i could eat a bit more and not gain the weight back... (eventually i did gain the weight back... but during that time i didn't.) it was the most wonderful few months of my life.

Life is good, and I am happy now, but its definitely more level than it was for the first few months. Adjusting to the happiness was... odd. i can't possibly begin to describe it... but it was by far, the happiest i've ever been in my entire life.

So thats about it. Thats basically my whole life... but more specifically my whole high-school experience. And so far, I have even come close to crossing the line back into the way i used to be. Well, maybe once came close to the line for like a day or something... but i've been more or less normal ever since then. and i love life.

~Julie

(if you would like to read my livejournal for that time go to http://www.livejournal.com/users/thisisme263, and in the calendar, that would be december 2003 to march/april 2004.)