My name is Eric Olsen and I have been through depression multiple times in my life. Not only have I had intense depressive episodes, but I have also had to battle chronic depression in my life.

As time goes on I will write a more complete version of my story, but here is the abridged version.

At the tender age of 12, my family was in Paris vacationing. After a few days in Paris, we began driving to visit our family in Italy. However, as we were leaving France, our car crashed into a semi, instantly killing my mother. I myself fractured my skull, caught meningitis, and was on the very verge of death.

Through some act of miracles, immunity and love from my brother Marco, I was able to pull through. But I had gained some serious scars in the process. After my mom died, I did not get immediately depressed. Truthfully, I was a bit relieved to be free from her tyrannical overprotective parenting. Though today I wish she was still around so I could have gotten to know her as an adult. But what will be will be.

It is my belief that this trauma set me up to become depressed when I went to college after high school. By the third month of UCSB, I was deeply depressed. This depression lasted for months and I felt so alone and confused. I was very frustrated by the beefcake, party super hard scene. And I had not yet developed the inner strength and love to search for an alternative, so instead I was pretty sad about it, and just retreated into myself.

OCD symptoms also began to show, though I had no idea what these obsessive thoughts were at the time. After three months of being depressed, I began going out and getting incredibly wasted every weekend, at least two times a week.

Soon summer came and I was back at home. I came home to my ailing dad who had been bed-ridden ever since I was 12 when my mom got killed. Since he was driving, I think he felt pretty responsible for her death (he was never a very safe driver). And I believe this guilt sapped him of all his energy. My dad died that summer, but I was pretty okay with it. He was 81 and had been sick for a while, so I was pretty prepared for it.

So when fall came, I went back to UCSB. But I hated my electrical engineering courses. I hated my pot smoking, partying roommates. I couldn’t deal with everyday stuff. I just felt so irritable and frustrated. I guess there were a few friends I wanted to hang with, but not really. So I dropped out. I quit UCSB. I did it in a way so I could come back. I guess I technically took a leave of absence, but I had no idea if I would go back.

So I went home, to my mom and dad’s house, both of them dead. I stayed in my parents’ old room, and basically sunk into a deep depressed sadness.  I got a job selling knives and starting taking an economics course at Saddleback community college. I made some money, studied some economics, but after a few months back home, I got sick.

I was so so sick. I just didn’t want to move. I laid in my parents’ bed, and just withered away. I cried, I coughed, I sweated. I just remember feeling so sick and powerless. I got a call from work telling me to this thing about this employee meet up, and I was feeling better, so maybe I would go. But on the day of the meeting, I was still a bit sick, though I was feeling way way better!

The surf was way up, and there were some big waves, so I oped to go surfing instead of going to a stupid work meeting I remember being very cold (because I was still a little sick), but I caught some of the best waves of my life. But a few days later I got just as sick as before, maybe even sicker. So for almost 3 weeks straight I was sick as hell, depressed as hell just rotting in my parents room.

Around this time a friend of mine gave me a really good book. It was called “The Way of the Peaceful Warrior”, by Dan Millman and surprisingly, it pretty much snapped me out of everything (at least temporarily). I got well, wasn’t sick any more and kind of felt cool with the whole life process. I’m not saying this book will do the same for you, but sometimes the right sort of advice/perspective, at the right time, can fucking do wonders and be a catalyst for transformative change.

With the encouragement of some family friends, I decided to return to school. I would like to say that I was “cured” of my depression, but that wasn’t quite how it worked. When I went back to school, I was very careful not to drink. I got a new place, without my parting roommates, and found out that my friend had an opening in his place because he was going abroad for the rest of the year

I also started paying attention to how I ate, how I thought, and really woke up for the first time in my life. I felt like this time, a few months before my 20th birthday was the first time in my life I was acting/thinking semi-independently. I wasn’t seeing conspiracies or anything like that. It was more social stuff. I was seeing how thin the social veil really is. I was taking responsibility for my life in a way I hadn’t ever done before.

I have always been a bit more independent, a bit of a lone wolf but now I was really embracing that aspect of myself. I would go to parties sober, I would talk sober girls out of their clothes and kinda just went for stuff. I guess I became a bit less worried about failing socially. I became more outgoing, but in a genuine way, not just to cover stuff up.

I still kinda struggled with my school work (everyone struggles as a physics major), and I would years later discover that I hated physics. But oh well, I wanted to be known as a really smart guy, so I pressed on. (When I was in middle school and early high school I thought everyone thought I was dumb, so in my later years of high school and in college I overcompensated a lot!) (>_<)

To be continued