God Bless This Mess(34)

I rushed the very best sorority, hoping to find a group of girls I would bond with, since I had never really had a group of girlfriends my age. I quickly discovered that they didn’t usually accept girls from my high school. TCHS wasn’t considered a “classy” school. They liked to take girls from rich towns, preferably those who went to private schools. They made it clear that I was an exception.

They kept reminding me of it, too: “You got in, but . . .”

But what? Was I supposed to get on my knees and praise them? Was I some kind of charity case? It wasn’t right.

I got into that sorority thinking I’d achieved something, but then I didn’t want anything to do with it. Brady wasn’t allowed to come to some of the socials because he wasn’t in a fraternity, and that was against the rules. We were encouraged to “get to know” fraternity guys. Plus, there was always a party going on, and we were expected to be at those parties. I drank a little at school, for a hot minute the first semester, but I always felt bad about it. So I stopped.

I realized that the sorority had accepted me for my accolades. Not for me.

Combine that with my body-image issues, my potato-chip-colored dye job, and my continued rejection in the pageant world, and I swear I didn’t even know who I was anymore.

My whole life I’d been anxious about things, worried about whether I was doing things right, or doing the right things. Once I was in college, that anxiety tripled. Only now it was mixed with a feeling I’d never felt before.

In my sophomore year, I started skipping classes. I did my work. I still wanted good grades. I got upset if I got less than a 95 on a test. But I spent all day in bed. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I truly felt like I couldn’t.

I stopped going to church. Even when I went on an occasional Wednesday night to get together with a group of peers and talk about our faith, I didn’t pay much attention or really participate. I started drawing myself away from God.

I felt like I didn’t know what my purpose was in school, or in life. I didn’t care about my relationship with God. It was not that I was going and doing crazy things. It was just that I didn’t care.

Brady was good to me. He would lie in bed and hold me and let me cry, and I’d tell him, “I just feel sad. Why do I feel like this every day?”

“Maybe you need to go see somebody,” he said.

I didn’t listen.

One day I dragged myself to campus, and I just started silently crying in the middle of chemistry class.

I tried to talk to my mom about it. “My life is gray. I don’t have anything that’s, like . . . I don’t have a reason to be sad,” I said. “But I am sad. And that makes me even more sad.”

My mom basically told me to get over it.

“Everybody gets sad, Hannah,” she said. “You’re fine.”

My mom had grown up with a mother who had tried to kill herself during most holidays she can remember. She spent Christmases visiting her mom at a mental hospital. She was mad at her mom for what she’d done, and I’m pretty sure she thought her mother had made a choice to be the way she was. Talking about depression, or, God forbid, any kind of mental illness, just wasn’t something that happened in our house.

Plus, I looked fine. I wasn’t doing drugs. I wasn’t drinking. I wasn’t hurting myself. And my little brother was acting out in all sorts of ways. My parents had their hands full with him.

“Stop talking about it. You’re fine!” was the message they gave me. “You have no reason to be sad.”

I went back to school and tried to be okay. But nothing got better.

That summer I couldn’t even drag myself out to go to the beach. The beach had always been my favorite place to go, my favorite place to be. I used to tell people it was the place where I felt God’s presence. “I just love the way the sun feels, hitting your skin. Staying out there all day. I don’t wanna do anything else. I just wanna be on the beach!” That was me.

The one time my parents managed to get me to go with them that summer, it didn’t help. I got to the beach and still felt this overwhelming emptiness and heaviness. Even with my toes in the sand, the tears welled up in my eyes.

My mom looked over at me, bawling in my beach chair. She of all people knew the beach had always been my happy place.

“We will get you help,” she said.

After that, both of my parents were more compassionate with me, but I still didn’t get myself to a therapist or psychologist. It wasn’t until I got a routine checkup that our family doctor noticed something was wrong. He looked me over, checking my vitals, and then asked me directly, “Are you happy?”

I swear, it felt like no one had ever asked me that question before.

Huge tears welled up in my eyes, and it hit me: I wasn’t just sad.

“No,” I said. “I’m not happy. I don’t remember the last time I was happy.”

We talked about everything that I’d been feeling, and he put me on medication.

I didn’t take it at first. I had all kinds of anxiety about taking it. I felt shame about having to take something just to help me feel good. I kept thinking, Why am I like this? Why can’t I just be happy?

When I went back to UA for my junior year, there were three sorority sisters living in the house where I lived, and they noticed that I wasn’t okay. They saw me—really saw me. They asked what was wrong, and I told them. I told them I had to take this medicine, and I was scared about what it might do to me. And then, for some reason, I opened up and told them about everything I’d been feeling. And those three girls, who I had barely gotten to know in my first two years at UA, said, “We’re here for you.”