Dear my future partner

Dear my future partner,

In an effort of full disclosure, I wanted to announce the following to you and be upfront and honest.

I have depression and anxiety.

Please don't confuse this with sadness and nervousness that pass with time. I unfortunately am stuck with this condition for the rest of my lifetime and with you choosing to be with me seriously, it will be for the rest of yours.

Sometimes (hopefully more often than not) I am the girl you will fall in love with. A fun loving, bubbly, life loving girl who has got a crazy amount of love to give you and everyone else who touches my life. This is not a fake me, this version exists and believe me, she will love you with everything she has.

But you must be made aware of the other version of me. The one that struggles to wake up in the morning, the one that has anxiety attacks because the crowd is too large or the dog whines too much or there isn't enough milk. The one that retreats into pits of despair for no apparent reason, the one that struggles with life's small tasks like eating or showering or talking. This version of me can be needy, in need of praise, support, love, commitment, patience but can also want nothing to do with anyone including you. Some of the time you won't know which until it's too late and I'm either crying because you are too close or crying because you are too far away or sometimes crying due to both if that's even possible. I can be irrational and have an over active imagination for the worse. It's times like these where I'm easily offended and nothing you say or do will be right no matter how hard I try.

I'm aware that I haven't made myself sound like a very appealing person to date in the last paragraph but I say this to make you aware that this is my life, as hard as it may sound to you, living with this is much harder.

I can promise though that I will try to be the best version of myself for you but mostly and more importantly for me. I'm still the girl who wants a wonderful life full of love and light and happiness. I will always strive for the feeling of contentment even if it seems unattainable and hopefully that feeling includes you.


I really hope that you are my person, please understand my being skeptical in the beginning. I've been told before that my someone would be there through thick and thin and I've been shattered by the fallout. I'm looking for the love of my life and if you can't be that person for me then I would rather say goodbye now.


I write this letter because I need someone who will stick by me through good and bad and will love me for all of the pieces that make up my chaotic life. I need someone that will try to understand the darkness but who will provide the light at the end of the tunnel when I struggle to see it so that we can be happy together in mutual understanding and respect. I want a love that is deeper on all levels that someone can accept all of the flaws and nastiness that comes with depression and anxiety because they know that when we are amazing, nothing in the world will be able to stop us from conquering it.


Together is what I want because together, we are infinite.


With all my love,


Salina xx

Life... a year after the fall

A year ago... many would say that a year is a long time, that it's enough time to recover, to heal, to live and thrive knowing you got through the worst. To me, a year is so short and frustratingly I feel as lost and alone as I ever have.

This time last year I was in the middle of a mental, emotional, nervous, heartbroken, soul destroying breakdown and I will say that although the trigger was heart break like I'd never experienced before, the breakdown had been brewing under the surface for quite some time just waiting for its chance to destroy me.

A year ago today I wanted to sleep, I wanted to close my eyes and I didn't have a care whether I opened them again. Today I use sleep as my escape, a way to avoid dealing with the constant crappiness that depression keeps rolling out to me.

There's been some progress since, I've made it off Mum's and Dad's couch, I've made it out of my pajamas, I'm no longer heartbroken and after 8 long months I made it back to work. For most people, these things are a piece of cake. For me, they were some of the hardest things I've ever had to do and yet still I feel as though my life is sitting stagnant, waiting for this dreaded black dog to give up, to get off my back and allow me to experience happiness.

When I look back over this past year I have learnt more about myself than I could ever have imagined. I have worked harder than I ever have before to just get by in this life and the road ahead will be paved with much more personal growth and much more work for something others find so easy to have. Sometimes, like the past few weeks, I want to give up, out of exhaustion, out of despair but other times my will to fight gets me through the days. This fight is long, this is a fight I will be battling for the rest of my hopefully long and happy life but the rewards I hope will outweigh this illness, will outweigh my need to crawl up into an emotional ball and stay there.

It's times like these that I urge my family and friends to stick with me... I'm still me, the fun loving me... she is just currently stuck under a doona, behind a mask waiting to be found again. Hopefully... she is worth the wait...

Let me introduce you...

I have friend who is also my enemy, my frenemy. Let's call him Dep. He is the type of friend that you always wonder why you are friends with but you've been together so long that you can't imagine them not being around.

Dep has been my frenemy for as long as I can remember. And like most relationships we have had times that we have grown apart, that I don't think about him on a regular basis but then there are times, like the past 6 months that we are inseparable. It's times like these that our relationship is a destructive one.

We first became really close in my mid to late teens. Dep was always there to put me down, to make me see all the negatives in life, to make me think I was going crazy. He would make me cry constantly, make me fight and push away loved ones and during this time I wasn't mature enough to deal with what Dep was doing to me. I would talk to people about him, doctors would prescribe me with pills to get rid of him and I would struggle to understand him and the effect he had on my life. There was no reason why he was there, no matter how much I talked or how much I wracked my brain I could never work out why he stuck around. It eventually got to the point where I became good at hiding him even though I knew he was around my neck choking me. I also got good at ignoring him and telling myself he wasn't there. And it worked... for a long time he was always in the background, always keeping to himself... waiting...

Two years ago, Dep constructed a drawn out plan to reenter my life and this time he had one goal: to destroy me. He started with kicking me in my self confidence when I was rejected from an already lined up job then he moved on to making me feel horrid about where my life was going forcing me to change my plans twice, three times. Once my self confidence was destroyed, he started on my heart.

With each heartbreak, he took a piece of me, stripping me down, making it hard for me to catch my breath and the pain... the pain was worse with every piece. It was like he was taking part of my shield with every blow. Late last year, he took what I thought was the final piece I had and I fell into a heap. I couldn't breathe, eat, sleep. There was a time my parents physically had to come to my house and lift me off my bedroom floor where I had been laying for hours screaming and crying until I was too exhausted to move.

Dep had broken me and I was left to pick up the pieces and put my mask back together. I had gotten so good at doing it over the years that I had even convinced myself that I was fine, I'd pushed my hurt aside and my mask was breathing again. That was when I met him... the guy who could have potentially been the love of my life.

I guess it was part of Dep's plan to give me a break for a while, just enough for me to fall in love, just enough for me to feel really happy, just enough so that I could be the type of person that I wanted to be, the type of person he fell in love with and we were in love... we were blissfully happy. For the first time in my dating life I felt like I was being loved for who I was, I didn't need to be anyone else with him. He challenged me in all the right ways and it took some getting used to but for the first time I had a partner in this life, someone to look forward to the future with, someone who I could actually see a future with. I mean, he wasn't perfect... I was realistic, I never put him on a pedestal but he may have just been perfect for me... and from very early on as hard as I tried to initially resist it, I knew he could possibly be my one.

I was upfront about Dep's existence quite early on in the relationship but it took the loss of a so called best friend for Dep to get the crowbar out and start plying away at the existing cracks. Just enough for my insecurities to show and just enough for my person to pull away from me and my demons. In the space of a few months, Dep had taken two important people from my life, people who weren't strong enough to stick around to deal with what he was doing to my life.

The end of my relationship was the nail in an already very well constructed coffin that Dep had built for me. He had pushed me to the point of unimaginable pain... pain that caused me to take painkillers, too many painkillers and I was admitted to hospital.

Believe it or not, this is where my story starts. Dep is a personification of my depression, my black dog and I write this not to get sympathy but to get an understanding from people and an awareness for an often invisible illness.

This blog will consist of my life with Dep, my therapies, my thoughts, my lists, my everything. If the last year since this story ends/starts has taught me anything, it's that I'm an open book now and if that can help other people then this horrible illness might mean something.