EMILY | The war in my head: When anxiety and depression compete

It has taken Emily most of their life to accept that they are worthy of living. A story about anxiety, depression and learning to love your true self.
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This story was filmed on Wurundjeri Country, and we pay respect to the traditional owners of these lands.
Produced by Good Grief Productions.
Transcript
Emily: When you're little and you fall down people ask you like, where's the graze? Where's the bruise? Nowadays, it's like what do you put your head in your heart.
It's really hard for me to remember my parents saying that they're proud of me. Sometimes I'd be so scared of letting them down that I just wouldn't come home sometimes. So, I would go and sleep on park benches or stay in like the school library, like hide behind the bookshelves until the librarian went home.
School teacher: Well done Emily, you are a very clever girl.
Emily: I felt this growing emptiness inside of me and it was like this sink that could never be filled because at some point I'd lost the plug and no matter how much I tried to fill up with friends, with family, with studies and I just felt like it could never be filled. I just felt like I was a burden to everyone. So if I couldn't change situation I was in I would just I guess remove myself from it. So when I was 14 I tried to end my life. Not many people knew. I just put the mask right back on and went back to school. For me there's like a wall of masks and like I'll go into different situations and no one would really see the real me.
It was so weird experiencing anxiety and depression at the same time because my depression made me want to like stay in bed all the time but my anxiety would just make me so anxious about not doing anything. Or I want to sleep all the time it makes it would like keep me awake with these 'What if' thoughts? What if that person who like said that they liked me the other day was actually lying? It's this awful second thought that like everything that you believe to be true is not actually true. A few years later, I started uni I've been in therapy the whole time but it just, I was so tired.
You know fighting that unwinnable war my head. So when I was 18 I tried to in my life again. I didn't necessarily want to kill myself, it was just more so I wanted the pain to stop.
When you google like depression or anxiety or anything like that comes up with a million articles that are written by people who might not have experienced it. Whereas for me I like, went into this really big deep dive on like what someone else actually feels like. Like am I the weird emotions that I'm experiencing and these colors and this heaviness? Is that just me? I discovered these online forums where people were sharing their different experiences and stories of mental health. And I can't really tell you how healing it was really find out that I wasn't alone.
I felt genuinely motivated to actually get better.
Creative stuff has always been really important to me in my healing journey and video games are like one of the few places where I really felt like I could be. I can shape the world and me to be the person who I believed myself to be not who everyone else wants me to be.
There's so much stuff I would want to tell my younger self. There's nothing that you need to do or be just being you is enough. That for me that was that was the game changer. I'm okay where I'm at and I've built a life that I want to keep living.
About Beyond Blue
Established in October 2000, Beyond Blue initially focused on raising awareness of depression and reducing the associated stigma. As our knowledge and impact on people's lives broadened, through research and community engagement, we added the key issue of anxiety conditions in 2011 and, more recently, suicide prevention to our core purpose.
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