My battles with Depression and Addiction - 1

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Hello Hivers. Its been over a year now since my last post and for a while now I have been wondering where to pick it up from again. If anything has held me back from attaining my full potentials thus far in life then I would have to confess its been my long battles with depression and addiction. Thats something I have bottled up and kept to myself, which did no good to my chances of winning the fight anyway. However I thought it will be worthwhile to share it now. Of course it’s a very long story and so I figured it be better to share it in bits; you know the series kind of tale.

It all started some ten to eleven years ago when I was in my fourth year in college and had just woken up to some reasonable sum of money saved up from a scholarship grant. I couldnt have dreamt of a better miracle given the dire challenges I faced with financing my studies and taking care of my living expenses up until that point. I was schooling in a city away from home where I virtually had no family or relatives and would often exhaust the stipend I received from home days before the due date for the next one.

I came from a family of low-income peasants who struggled to pay tuition in a country where the government took little to no interest in matters of education.
With this grant I was able to kiss goodbye to home calls for upkeep money and had started saving most of it in the hopes of starting my journey in penny stocks investment. Being raised in a poor home I had grown disenchanted with poverty and all the travails that came with it. I was yearning to become financially free early in life having read Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad even before gaining admission into college.

With some of my scholarship money I bought my first laptop computer and quickly set out to acquaint myself with it. I was still staying in one of the rooms in the university’s heavily crowded hostel by then but had started making plans to move to a more private residence off-campus. But then one morning I came back into my room after classes to find my box broken and my computer gone missing. I was completely shattered and honestly no incidence in my life up until that moment had ever had me so devastated.

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I was quick to identify the suspect; a young boy who had entered the room with an empty backpack while search and queries went on as to the whereabouts of my computer. I instantly recalled seeing his face in the room for the first time last night while I was using my computer. It was the end of the semester and most students had gone on vacation save for some of us with pending exam dates. It was commonplace to see strange faces as roommates often received and even accommodated visitors in their corners and thus I wasn’t suspicious the previous night when I met his face. Investigations revealed he was not a real student but a sham who was notorious for perpetrating theft in the hostel in the guise of one. He was thereafter handed over to the hostel security who inexplicably lost him in their custody. For months and months he remained at large and I eventually let go to make plans for a new one.

However things took a further twist for the worse when the microfinance bank I had invested the savings from my scholarship grant defaulted on interest payment and could not release my invested funds when demanded. After months of failed promises, the management eventually declared bankruptcy and not even the government’s intervention could save investors monies from going down the drain. It was easily the biggest shock of my life. I had initially planned to invest in petty stocks but when I couldn’t obtain a citizenship identity from my state to facilitate the process of opening an account with the securities commission, I had opted for the high yield investment with the failed bank at the prompting of a senior colleague.

For months I mourned inconsolably and my despair knew no measure. I was starting to backtrack in my academics and life in general having come to prefer solitude. I didn’t have much friends in the new city, most of them were faraway in my hometown just like family was. I knew I needed some mental support to help my head from bouncing off the wall so I checked into my school’s department of Psychology where I talked to one of the lecturers. I couldn’t make it beyond two sessions and decided of my own freewill to take some time off to a nearby beach town to try and wean my mind off all its recent troubles. I would watch the sea waves day and night before retiring to my rented apartment for rest. It was while at the beach that I had my first stick of cigarette, hoping to find some form of calm for my nerves. I can’t say how much relief I did get but two things were for sure though ; by the time I was leaving the beach town back to school, I had become hooked on smoking and also made my way into my lecturers black book for staying away from classes without any formal form of leave. My troubles were multiplied.

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