I am nineteen years old and have recently been diagnosed with clinical depression. I had to come home from school because I could not get myself out of bed to go to class. However, this isn't my first bout with depression. In high school, I was diagnosed with dysthymia at the end of my junior year. I quickly went on medication and felt as if I was a whole new person. My senior year was the first time I truly felt as if I was living and not only watching others live around me. In February I started dating a guy who I quickly formed a close relationship with (we had been friends since September). When we got together, I was hesitant because I was going to college soon, yet I had strong feelings for him, so I went for it anyway. The first four months of our relationship were amazing and I soon truly fell in love with him. I wasn't sure if I wanted us to stay together or not, but he seemed sure that he wanted to, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to try it. But as the summer came around, I soon became depressed again. I went to him, and he was there for me with open arms. I figured that this depression would pass, but it only got worse. I can even remember feeling disconnected at my graduation and prom and not being able to keep food down that day. Things went up and down, and when I was down I would go to my boyfriend. The love I felt for him soon became infatuation and dependence. In big social groups I would get upset and I was constantly apologizing to him for doing so. I tried extremely hard to stay in control, but the depression was on and off all summer. When I finally went away to school, I couldn't handle it. At first, my boyfriend was still supportive, but after one major freakout where I wouldn't let him get off the phone, things changed in a week and we broke up that weekend when I came home.

I now realize that there were things wrong with that relationship, obviously. I do feel lucky to have had someone who cared about me so much, and we have talked since we broke up and it is clear to me now that we did not break up because of my depression, but because I was going away to college and he would soon be too (he was a senior at the time). However, after we broke up my depression got worse and I spent most of my first semester of college in my room on the phone with friends or my parents trying to make sense of it all. When I came home for winter break, I found out that he had started dating someone new and didn't tell me. My sadness finally turned to anger and when I went back for second semester, I was a whole new person. I finally accepted that my "perfect relationship" wasn't so perfect and my "perfect" ex-boyfriend wasn't so perfect either. I started off the new semester with a fresh new outlook and had moved on from it all. I even had a new boyfriend met a lot of new friends and I enjoyed my classes and was doing well. Towards the end of the semester, things began to slip again and my classwork suffered. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to come back for the next year, but luckily my grades were just high enough that I didn't even make academic probation (exactly a 2.0, only because one incomplete from first semester hadn't yet turned into an 'F'). The next summer I tried to be alright with what had seemed to be the worst freshman year I could have imagined for myself. I had a job and was taking two classes to make up for the classes I had missed. However, I was still depressed though I managed to make it through my classes (I earned 7 credits!).