This is the coming out story of our very own Kansas City chapter Vice President!
(Content warning: this post contains talk of deep depression and talk of self harm.)
Picking up a few paragraphs in…
I was always pretty smart. I did well in my classes. As in the ones I enjoyed, Bs in the ones not as much. I graduated from high school in the top 8% of my class of 340 people. I spent practically all of the free time my parents would allow writing programs and learning more about computers. I felt as if I was capable of doing anything I put my mind to.
I started at a community college my first year after high school, and after that moved to a school that was in state but far away. I needed to move away from home for a while. I was majoring in computer science (the obvious choice) and was doing very well. For a while anyway.
There was a problem. For as long as I could remember, this problem plagued my mind in some fashion or another. Depression. This feeling of life being awful. The feeling that I was awful. I hated it. The more time went on though, the more the depression soaked into my life. It stems back as far as I can remember — all the way back to kindergarten. I had many times in high school where I hated my life and really couldn’t stand it. It got worse in college. By the fifth semester, depression was so bad that I didn’t have the energy to go to class, and learning was impossible. My brain had basically shut off by that point. I couldn’t think straight. I was chronically unmotivated to do anything, often including eating. Those computer projects I loved hadn’t been touched in years. My passions were gone, and basically any form of existence I had known was gone too. I really wanted to die. I finally dropped out of college to try to save my falling 1.9 GPA before it got worse.
Read the rest of Sarah’s beautiful and inspirational story here.
