How resilience became my superpower
This is the story of how a depressive episode helped me find strength in life — and an attempt to reduce the stigma of reaching out for professional help.
It took me a long time to decide whether to publish this story. It’s a deeply personal and sad story but with a happy ending — I promise. A story that makes me cry every time I reflect on it, but it’s tears of joy running down my cheek because I am incredibly thankful for what happened to me.
It’s neither a tragedy nor an extraordinary story, so if you’re looking for drama, you can stop reading now 😉. I believe what I experienced is actually very common, it’s just not talked about as much. To understand this story, I will have to explain a little bit about myself when I was younger…
Music and how I started to write
As a teenager, I developed a powerful coping mechanism to deal with my emotions — and my gosh I had a ton of them (who doesn’t at that age? 🙈), and for me, they were mostly on the sad side. At the same time, I was not particularly good at expressing my emotions in front of others — something I had never really learned.
To process the emotional ups and downs of teenage life, I wrote songs that I accompanied with my guitar. Coming up with the lyrics, finding the right tunes, and then the joy of singing along — these were the essential steps in the process. I’ve spent hours and hours in my room coming up with new songs that I rarely showed to other people. I mostly wrote them for myself.
This coping mechanism has provided me with a lot of time for myself and for active reflection on the things that were going on in my life. I probably started writing songs when I was 12. And it was around the age of 18, in my last year of high school, that I started to lose touch with music, writing, and singing. I simply did not have time for it anymore — or at least that’s what I told myself.
I started studying right after graduating from high school. I remember being totally overwhelmed in my last year of high school with a plethora of extracurricular activities while getting my driver's license and also working four different part-time jobs. Jumping right into the university jungle after that was maybe not the best idea — and moving into my own apartment after my first year of studying did not help either.
Even though I was no teenager anymore, there were still lots of emotions and new situations to process. At that moment in my life, I desperately needed a coping mechanism. I neither had one nor did I realize that I needed one. I just thought the feelings of stress and sadness that I experienced over a prolonged period of time were normal.
Mexico and the mental breakdown
I somehow managed to finish my bachelor's degree. On the bright side, I had an awesome internship lined up before starting my master’s degree, and I was planning to go traveling for the first time outside of Europe with two good friends at the end of my gap year.
After my internship finished, we embarked on a journey to Latin America. Our first destination was Cuba — and even though I loved the experience, I would not recommend it as the first country to go to outside of Europe. We spent a month of hiking in beautiful landscapes, dancing salsa, not-always-so-great food, and having to deal with scammers and marriage proposals every single day 😩. ‘Relaxing’ is the last word that comes to mind when thinking back to this trip.
After a month in Cuba, we continued to Mexico. What a relief this was! I sincerely doubted that backpacking was for me when traveling through Cuba, but Mexico changed my mind. A country so rich in cultural experiences and beautiful landscapes, and with the best food and the friendliest people… I instantly fell in love.
However, I had a rough start there, and it had nothing to do with Mexico. When we arrived in Yucatan, I had not talked to my then-boyfriend for a month, because in Cuba we were off the grid. On our first phone call, he presented me with the news that he wanted to end our relationship (to be fair, he planned to wait until I was back with telling me, but I immediately noticed that something was off).
I was heartbroken. The past year had been incredibly difficult for both of us. I know now that I had been going through a depressive episode at the time, and my boyfriend was the only person that I had let in on how I felt. For months, I had cried almost every evening in front of him not able to explain what was wrong — leaving him feeling completely helpless.
When I left for the trip, he must have felt like a giant burden fell off his chest. Today, I understand how difficult it must be to support a partner that is going through depression, especially when that person has not accepted or realized yet that she needed help. At the time I did not know what was happening to me — or to him.
I had a wonderful life, everything was going well. I had no reason to be sad, and that fact made me even sadder.
The hardest thing for me was the fact that I was so incredibly sad and on the edge of crying every day for absolutely no reason. I had a wonderful life, everything was going well. I had no reason to be sad, and that fact made me even sadder. Logically, I was not supposed to be depressed, and still, there I was, crying every evening on my boyfriend’s shoulder.
When I received his phone call in Mexico, my world fell into a thousand little pieces. This wasn’t a normal breakup, I had a mental breakdown. I had to face the fact that I could not continue my life as I had for the past couple of years — and that I needed help, professional help.
At the same time, I still had another three weeks of traveling planned in Mexico together with my best friend. Every day, I had to balance the deep pain I experienced and our shared wish to have a memorable and fun trip together. It was a rollercoaster that brought our friendship to a steep edge, but we managed and found a way — it eventually grew us closer together. To this day, I cherish a lot of beautiful memories from this trip to Mexico with her.
At the end of the three weeks, we flew home knowing that things would need to change for me back home. Due to our students’ budget, we had a flight to Milan with the intention to take the train back home to Zurich, which was a lot cheaper. My parents, who I was in touch with throughout the whole trip, decided to drive down 4 hours to Milan to pick us up — probably the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.
The moment I saw my Mom at the airport, I collapsed into tears.
I hit rock bottom, right there at Milan airport in front of my parents, my best friend, and a bunch of strangers. I had no energy left to pretend that I was doing well while I was clearly not. About two weeks later I started to go to therapy.
Therapy and the discovery of resilience
For the next ten months I went to see my therapist first every week, then every other week. At the same time, I started doing my master's. It was an intense time, but I am incredibly grateful that I found a therapist that understood me and was able to help me right away, and that I could still continue to study. I am very much aware that this is not always the case.
I also had to first warm up to the idea of going to therapy. I grew up in a family in which going to a doctor was seen as a weakness. The concept of mental health was almost completely unknown — except for the handful of aunts and grandmothers (yes, all women!) that were known to be ‘nuts’. Luckily, this has changed quite a bit since then, but I basically grew up thinking that only “crazy” people go to therapy.
In therapy, I realized quickly that my situation — which was diagnosed as a depressive episode — had been an accumulation of many different things. It was a complex matter, therefore I started to get extremely interested in figuring it out. After all, I am an engineer at heart, and solving complex problems is what drives me.
I am pretty sure my therapist knew that as well because she offered so much background information about what we did and why that I also realized a lot about the wonders of the human psyche. After 10 months of going to therapy, I was released back into the world — understanding a lot more about myself, and also knowing that such an episode could come back anytime if I wasn’t paying attention to my emotions.
Today I know that resilience is probably my biggest strength, almost like a superpower.
One of the things my therapist told me in our last session was that she was impressed by my resilience — my ability to bounce back. I had heard about resilience before, but in chemistry or biology class in the context of materials or ecosystems. Never had I thought about resilience in the context of humans, let alone myself. Today I know that resilience is probably my biggest strength, almost like a superpower.
Yoga and the power of self-awareness
Resilience is not something you're born with, it’s something you cultivate. It’s also not something you earn and then keep for every. It can disappear again — I’ve learned that the hard way. I also learned that building up resilience is very individual. While some people need to challenge and expose themselves to difficult situations, others need stillness and quietness to build up the strength to recover quickly from tough situations.
I learned for myself that to be resilient in the face of stress or difficulties, I need a coping mechanism that is engrained in my everyday life. And while as a teenager my coping mechanism was to write and sing songs for myself, today I use another physical and mental practice for this.
I have found a way to keep up my resilience by practicing yoga. Yoga has become my way of living — it guides most of the decisions in my life in one or another way, both consciously and unconsciously. And it helps me to process emotions and to understand the sensations in my body. Yoga has become the coping mechanism of my adult life.
Don’t get me wrong… I am not saying that everybody should start doing yoga, even though the world would probably be a more mindful place if that would happen 😉. What I am saying is that for me it was important to realize what my coping mechanism is and that I needed it in my life.
A lot of who I am today has started to unfold based on what I learned about myself in therapy. I became more aware of myself — and I continue to train my self-awareness through my yoga practice, but also through other activities such as having mentors and coaches, reading, teaching, writing, and so on. I will be forever curious to understand myself better — and all of it started with going to therapy in 2015.
I learned to express my emotions in a way that works for me. And that’s the true foundation of my resilience.
In therapy, I also learned to really accept myself with all my good and bad traits —and this is something that is easier said than done. I learned to embrace what I experienced as a child and to let go of the things I cannot control. I learned how to forgive myself for not being perfect all the time, and to forgive others for what’s in the past.
I also learned — and that’s maybe the most important — to express my emotions in a way that works for me. Today, I can be my authentic self without feeling any strain. And that is probably the true foundation of my resilience that I can build upon and draw from.
Gratitude and mental health awareness
I am certainly not doing everything right and I often fall back into old patterns. But today, I am able to recognize when that happens, and I can react accordingly. Today, I can help myself — but only because I received professional help at some point in my life. I am grateful I received this help, but I am also aware that I could have reached out for help earlier if only I had known someone who had experienced something similar and to whom I could open up.
At the time I went to therapy I didn’t know a sole human being that openly talked about depression. One step of my recovery process was to talk about my depression with people that I knew — some close ones, but also acquaintances. I started to talk about what I learned in therapy with a lot of people and you can probably guess what happened: I learned that quite a few people around me had either gone to therapy themselves or had a close relative that went. And I had absolutely no idea…
So, now you know what I’ve gone through. Here’s my story, for anyone to read, the story of how I have gone through a depressive episode and how therapy has helped me find strength. I feel no shame about this period of my life, far from it. I feel deep gratitude for what happened to me because it allowed me to grow into the resilient and strong person I am today.
All of us will be going through difficult situations at some point in our lives— some sooner and others later. And I wish all of us to have someone in our lives with an extra portion of resilience, someone who can hold and catch us when we hit rock bottom — like my Mom did when they picked me up at the airport.
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Thank you for reading my story. ❤ If you’d like to share your experience with depression, therapy, mental health, or anything else that comes to mind, I invite you to write it proudly in the comments.
