Demi: Depression and Suicidal Tendencies

Originally released 2020

In Episode 7 of Our Stories, Demi talks about living with depression since age 14, growing up in a tense home, and the first time suicidal thoughts appeared. Demi also describes the conversations that made opening up feel possible.

Watch Episode 7 on YouTube · See all episodes of Our Stories

Transcript

This transcript is lightly edited for reading: punctuation added, and “uh” and “um” removed where the meaning is unchanged. Words in [square brackets] are editorial, and [censored] marks words the captions left out.

From the age of 14 up until, like, even now at 26, like, I, I’ve just been kind of grappling with this heavy, really weird, dark feeling. And sometimes it gets easier to shake, sometimes it doesn’t. In high school it definitely wasn’t easy to shake, mostly just because I didn’t know what it was, and I couldn’t put a pin in it. I couldn’t identify it. I just knew that, like, I didn’t feel good, and I didn’t feel like I had a lot of support to help me feel good or to help me figure out what was wrong. I didn’t feel like I could turn to anybody.

I grew up living with my mom. She had sole custody, and then my dad saw us, like, on weekends. And my mom remarried, and her, her second husband was a total, total dick. But from him came my brother, and he’s not a dick. He’s awesome. But my house was just this weird kind of walking-on-eggshells, very high-tension, stressful environment, because my stepdad was such, like, an angry, looming, awful presence.

My mom is currently a functioning alcoholic. She’s gotten better, but at the time it was, like, throughout high school I clocked it even more, but I was always aware of it growing up. So that kind of contributed to her, how she and I kind of got on. Because after a certain time in the evening, I couldn’t sit and have a conversation with my mom and my stepdad, because they were intoxicated, and when they got intoxicated, they got verbally violent. They just knew how to get into your brain and really make you feel awful. And then if I try to stick up for myself, it was shot down, and it was made invalid. “You’re being a drama queen.” “What you’re feeling is wrong.” “Your feelings aren’t valid.” Those were, like, things that I heard a lot growing up.

So I didn’t open up, with that, with that notion that I would be burdening people, and also just feeling like no one really gave a [censored], because no one in my, in my house appeared to give a [censored], so why would anybody else give a [censored]? And that was when I first experienced suicidal tendencies. Just sitting in English class, I remember just fantasizing about that, and just daydreaming and wondering what that would be like, and feeling like that’s where I would get to. Because, yeah, I didn’t feel like I had anybody to talk to, and I was so insecure.

One night, actually, I was out at a theatre party. That was when I was, it was my Grade 12 year. I was 17. And it was just all women. It was me, my best friend and a bunch of older women in my theatre community. And one of them had recently gone through a divorce, and she was this awesome lady, or is this awesome lady. She’s great. And she was somebody who I turned to for advice, because she was also my hairdresser. Whenever I would go into the chair to get my hair cut, I guess I would subconsciously just drop these little hints or express these little feelings of insecurity, and I guess she started clocking that.

And one night we were at this party, and we were having a big bonfire, and that’s when we got, we got to talking. And somehow I just felt safe enough to open up, and I remember distinctly saying, like, referring to my best friend, like, “You know, sometimes my day just gets so, so lonely, so sad. My best friend, she’s the only one who asks me how my day is, like, how my day is going or how I’m doing.” She was the only [one] who ever expressed that. And I remember just the circle just kind of going quiet, and then I just kind of started spitballing more and [spitballing] more.

And then finally, like, I was inside getting a soda, and this woman, my hairdresser, who had just gone through a divorce, pulled me aside, and she said, “Demi, I want to tell you how brave you are for talking about your feelings. Do you talk about this stuff often?” Because I think I had mentioned how depressed I felt. I said, “No, no, no, I, I don’t want to talk to people. I, I don’t want to scare them. I don’t want to this, I don’t want to that.” Excuse, excuse, excuse.

And then I just remember her pulling up her shirt, and she said, “You need to talk to people, otherwise this is going to happen to you.” And she pulled up her shirt, and on her wrist were, like, horizontal scrape marks. And this woman was, like, in her mid-40s, had a [censored] together, and I was like, “Oh my God.” That really hit me, is that if I didn’t start opening up about how I was feeling, then I would sink so low that maybe I would [resort] to something like that. Which was terrifying, because not just… earlier that day, like, I had been thinking about that.

It was interesting. I took a trip to Europe with my sister after my first year at UBC, and we just sort of… I remember us sitting in a, in a courtyard in Verona, and we just started talking about our feelings. My sister and I have always been close, but we’ve never talked about mental health. We’ve never talked about sadness, really, or what it means to be sad, or what it means to feel like you’re sad constantly. And we talked more about my mom and my stepdad’s divorce, and my mom and my dad’s divorce, and how that has impacted us as kids. And it made me feel safer, because I felt like I finally had, like, a solid confidant who understands inside and out what I’m going through, because we’re going through the exact same thing.

About Our Stories

Our Stories is a 10-part documentary series from URevolution. In each episode, one person talks about their own mental health in their own words. See all episodes, transcripts and support resources.

If you need support, find free helplines in Canada, the US, Australia and elsewhere.

Credits