When There Is No Further Down to Go

We have already read a story on this blog about a woman whose world collapsed beneath her feet and who is now using every ounce of strength to climb out of the hole without giving up.

Something similar happened to me, and I would like to share my story.

I was twenty-one when I met my former fiancé.

It was a great love, and he still sometimes appears in my dreams even though we have been apart for six years.

We moved in together quickly.

First into a rented place, then into a small house with a garden in a large provincial city.

There was no central heating, only a solid-fuel boiler.

The road was not paved.

The city centre was far away.

And I absolutely loved living there.

It was our little home.

My partner proposed.

I imagined we would have a baby after I finished college.

Then, by the time I graduated, I thought perhaps we should wait a little longer.

Slowly, love began to fade.

We were both very young and drifted farther and farther apart.

He escaped into drinking with his friends.

I found comfort in dancing.

After seven and a half years, we decided we no longer wanted to live together or plan a shared future.

For some time, I had been the one saying that things could not continue this way and that he needed to change.

Today I understand that I should have done more too instead of expecting only him to make the effort.

In the end, he was the one who found somebody new.

He told me he would soon move out.

The breakup was incredibly painful.

Even for him.

One night he cried the entire night.

And of course it was very difficult for me too.

The realisation that I was genuinely losing him reignited feelings I thought had faded.

But by then, there was no way back.

After he moved out, I remained alone in the house.

We would eventually have to sell it because there was a mortgage on it.

For a few months, I actually felt fairly good.

Free.

Then loneliness crashed down on me.

Along with the question:

What happens to me now?

I had never lived alone before.

I had no idea where I would go after the house was sold.

And I could not even imagine somebody else owning the little house I loved.

Did I really have to begin everything again?

I did not want to.

As a child, the pattern I had seen from my parents was that depression was the solution.

So I chose the same road.

Slowly I destroyed myself.

At 178 cm, I weighed only 53 kilograms.

And I decided I did not want to live.

I did not want to start over.

I refused to ask for help.

I did not want to see a doctor or take medication.

But because I was not eating and could not sleep, my mind also began to fail.

After I broke down at work, my brother took me to a psychiatric hospital.

They admitted me.

That cycle continued for a year.

Into psychiatry.

Out again.

I even lost my job because of it.

I was drowning in self-pity and selfishness.

I did not believe medication would make me better.

And more importantly, I did not even want to get better.

To this day I do not believe the medication alone is what healed me.

At some point, I simply decided:

Enough.

I wanted to feel better.

From there, recovery slowly began.

Online, I met a man from Budapest.

Not long afterwards I moved to the capital to be with him, and I found a job fairly quickly too.

Our relationship lasted only a few months.

But I remain grateful to him to this day.

He stayed beside me even though he could see and understand what state I was in.

There were still mornings when my hand trembled as I put sugar into my coffee.

After we broke up, I rented a room in a shared apartment.

That was almost five years ago.

Today I live alone.

I have a good job that I enjoy.

And I am waiting for the right partner to find me.

There have been smaller and larger difficulties since then.

But I made a decision:

I will never allow myself to fall that far again.

I cannot.

Of course the fear remains inside me.

My mother lives in a residential home for psychiatric patients.

My father died by suicide.

But that was their fate.

I have to work so that mine is different.

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My friends help me enormously.

They stand beside me when I need them and often hold up a mirror.

And I am no longer ashamed to ask a professional for help when I feel there is something I cannot put in place or process alone.

What I deeply regret is how much pain and anxiety I caused my family back then by refusing to climb out of the hole.

There is a way out.

You simply have to want to find it.

(The cover image is an illustration.)

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