How a Korean Drama Helped Me Fight Depression

This article comes with trigger warnings for depression, suicidal ideation, abuse, and mentions of transphobia. For many people, retrospection means remembering all of the people you met, the places you traveled, and the things you accomplished in the last lap around the sun. For someone like me, however, this also means being grateful for the future I didn’t think I was going to survive to see. Flipping open my art journal to about a year ago, you might be able to pick up the telltale signs; between being uprooted from a community I’d poured my life into, struggling to find a job and form friendships, a devastating break up, and part of my family moving across the ocean while the other part suffered from physical ailments, my mental health finally gave out. I could recite the typical descriptions of feeling alone, numb, and grey, how I spent days at a time in my bed crying because the pain of being in my own head was excruciating or where I hid the knife “just in case”, but I think this picture I drew of how I viewed my body (curled up and filled with dark static) says it best:

One of the hardest obstacles of healing from depression without a doubt is the stigma, and even though I knew several people (including family, I found out later) who fought daily with mental illness I rarely reached out because I was afraid my situation wasn’t “bad enough” to warrant attention. This is also the reason I hesitated for a long time to seek out a therapist as I thought that I didn’t des…