Ayoka: From that point, did your family seek help for you?
Shaquana: I did not seek medical or psychological help but that was the point where my mother
took me to church. That’s when I really started going to church. My mom and someone else had
talked to the pastor about the incident. I started talking to him and that is when I joined the church.
:Ayoka: Did your depression transfer from teenage years to your adulthood
Shaquana: Yes I felt like no one really understand or help me. I didn't want to come across as
weird so I kept to myself and I just found other ways to deal with it. The only person that really
noticed was my husband. He was the one who was closest to me and had to deal with me and
that way. I was just I was withdrawn, crying all the time, overeating. One of the things that cause
my depression as an adult was the relationship I had with my father. It surfaced when I had
children and I would get so sad when I saw my husband with my daughters. Not to say that I was
jealous, but it hurt to see my husband with my daughters. I saw how much he loved and adored
them.
I saw how much I missed out these were things that I did not experience with my father although
my younger sister had those experiences with my father the things that I could never get back.This
was something that I was forced to deal with.
My mother and father talked almost everyday. I would be in the house and they talked for hours.
But he rarely talked to me. No one asked me to come to the phone. I could go for days and weeks
not speaking to him yet he was still talking to my mother. She would have to ask him, have you
spoken to Shaquana? Then the lightbulb would click.
Now, we are closer, but it seems like now that I have lost the weight, he steps up to say how proud
he is of me. I didn’t hear that before. I am still the same person, so was there nothing to be proud
of before I lost weight?
Ayoka: How were you able to mask your depression?
Shaquana: Being overly happy, overly confident in myself. I was always happy and chipper to
people on the outside but it was an act. People thought that I always had it together because I
made it look like I always had it together. But they did not know that when I got home I was a
mess.
Ayoka: That is the point of this interview to show that the state of depression is not what people
think