Sitting alone at a Cellar table is 24-year-old Jessica Jones. As she sips her beer quietly, in the background pop and rap music rises and falls on schedule. A snowstorm rages outside.
Her boyfriend sits at the bar counter a few feet away.
“He likes to be alone,” she said.
Jones is conflicted. She describes herself as a bit of a party girl and yet there’s something she can’t shake.
In 2011, when Jones was in first-year university, one of her high school friends walked out on a cold Christmas evening and never came back.
It ruined her.
“He was found alive in the woods but he was frozen and he died on the way to the hospital,” she said. “We talked the day he disappeared.”
While he didn’t drop any hints of what was going to happen, he did tell her she would always be his best friend. She still doesn’t know why he did it.
Now she feels a ghost in the room. An after-image of her friend follows her.
She too now suffers from depression and anxiety.
She feels she hurt her friend. She didn’t understand why there were two versions of him, the first being the one she knew, the other dark and gloomy.
She didn’t understand why he couldn’t just be happier.
Jones realizes people can’t understand depression unless they’ve gone through it. But in a twist of fate, she’s been misunderstood by professors, her friends and by her own parents.
“I do believe people have the best of intentions.”
She wishes she knew then what she knows now to help her friend. But she can’t.
It’s a bit of a catch-22.
“It is what it is,” she said.
It was March of her first year that her roommate told her she had to get out of bed and go to classes.
“One night we were getting drinks and I was like, ‘I’m really scared I’m going to kill myself because I don’t know how to live my life.’”
The next day her roommate took her to the hospital but she was initially misdiagnosed.
They had her on several medicines she said mixed poorly.
“What I ended up getting in the end was not being able to get out of bed. I was so exhausted all the time.”
When she wasn’t in bed, she said her mind was constantly racing, shooting off to crazy places where it normally wouldn’t go. Other times she would wake up in the middle of the night with intense cravings and raid her fridge.
“It made the suicidal thoughts much, much worse.”
In May, she decided to get off the drugs completely and that helped a lot. She’s remained off them since.
She still feels her mother doesn’t completely understand what was going on in her head at that time in her life, but said things are better now.
Even still, she says her relationship with her mother has left a scar from that time in her life.
At the time of her initial diagnosis, she started going to UNB counseling and getting the help she needed to work through her emotions.
While being improperly medicated messed with Jones’ head, by September 2013 she received the correct diagnosis: major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder.
She said sometimes she still gets sad, but with her therapy sessions, she’s learned to manage them.
“All these emotions, they come and they go.”
She’s graduating as a triple major in criminology, psychology and human rights.
She has dreams of going to law school.
After ordering another beer, she says love seems to be the thing she sees people needing the most. People try to compartmentalize things they can’t or shouldn’t.
But she also says what amazes her is how much people grow.
While there isn’t a day that goes past she doesn’t think of her friend, she has come to terms with it in some ways. He’s still there, in her mind, but she now knows that depression is not as simple a fix as putting on a smile and hanging out with her friend.
And while she still wishes she could have reached out to her friend armed with the knowledge she knows now, she knows she has to move on. She can only change the future.
“I’m just trying to find my place in the world.”
