Moving is not a new part of my life.  I’ve moved over twelve times, to and from more than six places.  However, after having the most stable home that I can remember for five years, moving away when I was fifteen felt like my whole world was crumbling apart.  Before I moved, small things seemed to have the biggest impact in my life.  Getting an F on a test, losing a swim race, or breaking a nail seemed earth-shattering.  I truly believed these small events were huge struggles until I found out that I would have to move away from my longest lasting home.  For many weeks, I refused to face the fact that I would have to leave behind all that I knew.  Once I finally came to terms, the last few weeks of my previous life felt like I was attending my own funeral.  All the people I surrounded myself with were telling me, “You’ll make plenty of new friends really quickly,” or “It’s only a three hour drive away” and, “It’s not the end of the world.”  Despite their attempt to comfort me, I felt life as I knew it coming to an end.

I was losing five years of friends, memories, and routine.  I felt so comfortable with my relationships and daily life.   Moving away was an ordeal that consumed my every action for the remaining weeks I lived there.   After I received the news that I would be moving, I sunk into feeling sorry for myself.  My struggle became larger than life and no one could possibly understand the immense pain of what I was going through.  I brought up my struggle at every opportunity and pushed it into the lives of my peers.  I allowed my struggle to become my identity.  The moving was a parasite.  A blood-sucking, life-consuming parasite.  And I truly believed that it was going to end my life.

The night before I moved, I had a going away party with my friends, my final goodbye.  Even after the long night, three of my closest friends and I got up earlier than I had to, just to swim and have one final memory.  That day, after I swam and began my drive to my new home, is one of the most vivid memories of sadness I’ve ever had.  As I drove over the bridge, a bridge that I soon learned was an icon of this “island”,  my best friend called me and told me I had left my flowers at her house and needed to come home.  The tears poured and I started my first step into my new town heartbroken.  From that moment, my life did not stop accelerating without bounds before my very eyes.  I started water polo my first full day.  Water polo isn’t a sport I love in the first place and suddenly I was playing it over twenty seven hours a week, with girls I felt I was hated by. 

The rest of my summer between freshman and sophomore year flew by in a I-have-so-much-to-do-of-what-I-hate kind of way.  The school year started and I went home and cried at lunch the first day.  Don’t worry, the next days weren’t any better but I didn’t cry.  I spent the year cycling through fake friends and playing God knows how much water polo.  I was constantly sad and begged to go to what I thought was home at every opportunity. 

Finally, after an entire year of misery, during the summer I began to think Coronado would be okay.  I had a few friends and kept myself busy with what I liked.   Everything was going okay until I went back to my real home for my Junior year homecoming.  I had an amazing time and reinforced the idea that it would always be somewhere I wanted to go back.  Or so I thought.  Returning to my fake home after that weekend, I had the weirdest sensation of “no-feeling”.  My sense of touch on my entire body was altered out of no where.  I thought I was going crazy.  Yes, I could feel you pinching me or him poking me or her slapping me.  But the sensation of it all was gone, fabrics didn’t feel like fabrics and showers didn’t feel like showers.  I ignored this for a day until I woke up in the middle of the night, my sense of touch even more gone than before.  I couldn’t breath, I couldn’t think, I would’ve sworn I was about to die.  I screamed for my mom and she calmed me down after hours of questioning me between my sobs.  I went to school and upon coming home, when this crazy “no-feeling” hadn’t gone away for almost forty-eight hours, we went to the hospital.  They did nothing to alleviate my fears, saying I had probably had a panic attack and was suffering from prolonged anxiety from my trip.  How would they know?  They don’t know me, they don’t know my life.  I was upset and angry, I hated people who claimed they were “anxious” and had panic attacks.  I didn’t want to be that girl. 

I ended up going to therapy for it and for weeks my symptoms didn’t go away, and every time they did they came back.  I stopped going to therapy for several months and my “anxiety” and panic attacks didn’t go away.  In fact, they got worse.  I started going back to therapy and after weeks of recreating what I had already gone through, my therapist determined that I had depression.  She took back her diagnosis of anxiety and determined that my stress and unexplainable fits of crying and freaking out were due to over a year and a half of depression.  Talking it out, we determined that turning to medication would be the next logical step.  The depression that I have is a chemical imbalance combined with a negative self-talk.  The medication will take care of the chemical imbalance and working with my therapist I will become better at a more positive self-talk.  I wish I could say I’m cured now and this experience brought me closer to knowing myself and answered all my questions about life.  But it didn’t.  Moving genuinely made my life extremely hard and it will never be something I’ll get over.  Maybe someday I will look back and say I’ve learned from this, but for now I am still struggling with the experience almost two years later.