“This sounds very harsh, but my mother always said, ‘He’ll never live past 24.’ 32-year-old Marnix from Klundert also had that feeling. From the age of 12 he struggled with depression. He could not count on understanding his environment at such a young age. Marnix therefore came out less and less, while his thoughts became increasingly dark. “At one point I thought: What am I still doing here?” he says in the podcast ‘On to the man’.
In eighth grade, Marnix started to feel worse and worse. He often had the flu, had a lot of headaches and stomach aches and he dared less and less. “If I had to go to the hairdresser, I would already be gagging in the sink. If I could go to school three times a week, that would be a lot,” he tells journalists Eva de Schipper and Evie Hendriks in the podcast ‘Towards the man’.
Due to his young age, Marnix consulted dozens of psychologists before a cause was found. “At first they thought I was afraid of going to high school. Later a psychologist said it was a small winter depression.”
“With mentor said I would never amount to anything if I was fake sick.”
Yet over the years the complaints became increasingly worse and more and more negative thoughts haunted Marnix’s head. “The valleys were getting worse than the peaks. In addition, my mentor enjoyed having me do an assignment in front of the class that I did not understand due to my absence. He then said that it will not work if you stay at home pretending to be sick. According to him, I would never achieve anything in my life.”
The result was that Marnix came out less and less. “I was just at home sleeping and playing games on my computer.” He went from psychologist to therapist and even took up to three pills of antidepressants a day. “That only made me sicker, so I stopped taking it. No one could give me the tools to feel better. My mother always said: he won’t get older than 24. I also had that idea.”
“My friends wondered why they would still hang out with me.”
Marnix also felt little understanding from his friends. “When I called one afternoon at the skating rink to ask if they wanted to do something fun, they wondered why they would still hang out with me. I never went to a festival and it was always a no.”
Marnix was left lonely on the skating rink, where his dark thoughts took over him. “I’m a loser. I’m never going to achieve anything. What am I still doing here? It was all running through my head. That’s when I first got the idea to quit my life,” he says.
“I found a trigger to live for.”
Marnix immediately realized that these thoughts were not good. “I called Youth Work in Zevenbergen. They did everything they could to talk to me.” With the help of Youth Work, Marnix found his passion in the following months.
“I was DJing in my attic room. They encouraged me and arranged performances. On a large stage, the fear and uncertainty was suddenly gone. I had found something to live for.” At Youth Work, Marnix met his girlfriend, with whom he lived more than ten years later in Klundert, together with their dog. “Now I think that unfortunately it just had to be that way. I have now put a positive spin on it.”
Marnix’s compelling story can be heard in a new episode of the podcast ‘Towards the man’. .
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