WordPress offers daily writing prompts which I rarely entertain, but I’ve been in a slump and decided it could be a worthwhile exercise. “What gets better with age?”

Yesterday, in attempts at stirring up my own inspirations, I took the daring plunge into my private tumblr where I kept my diary from approximately 2014-2019, the end of high school through college. I thought I’d be able to read it fairly unscathed giving the temporal distance I now have, but this wasn’t the case. The familiar ache of that age swiftly found its home in my chest as I scanned the many entries. Of course it hurt to be reminded of how much I was suffering then. I was really suffering. The resounding chorus of this archive, the unmistakable themes were 1. I hate my body 2. I am depressed 3. I want to die. The true heartbreak came in realizing that I cannot say that on an average day, ten years later, these things are not typically still true for me.

I began to panic as I recognized that the many diaries that have existed between that tumblr and the one that sits on my bedside table now hold mere permutations of the same few sentiments with nothing coming of the ruminations but pages filled. “I don’t want to waste my life being sad,” I wrote from my hot pink and zebra striped childhood bedroom. Surely I could not tell her that things are better– that she loves her body, that she isn’t depressed, that she is free of suicidal ideation.

But was it a waste? Was there ever another way? The words on the page are so similar, suggesting a decade of no growth, no change, no getting better. But I am not convinced the scribe has remained the same.

In the moments where I pause, yes there are similarities. And in the fact that writing in my journals has become habit, so has how I write in it, so I cannot fault patterns detected, and I must acknowledge the picture beyond these rhythmic vignettes of, admittedly, usually despondent reflections. The girl with a tumblr blog spent days in bed. She neglected her space, herself, her relationships. She believed she could never be loved deeply. Today, I go to therapy. I take my meds. I go to work. I follow through on plans more times than not. My actions are less dictated by my depression and more so by my commitments to myself and others. I am in love and it is very much requited.

The age old “it gets better” has always felt like a slap in the face. Because at a certain angle, I never felt like it had. Because if the “it” is my depression, no not really. It hasn’t gotten much better. But I have.