It’s finally time, I decided to myself on that lively, sunny day, so distinctly contrasting my usual disposition. It’s time to get out of here. I had had enough of this vacation, and it was time to get back to the real world. I had to become a real girl again, a girl with real dreams and a real future, leaving my train wreck past behind. I could not go on living in this sheltered place forever, no matter how much I’d like to.

“What do depression, bipolar disorder, and cancer all have in common?” I asked my therapist later that day.

The therapist, unused to my willingness to talk, turned her sharp eyes towards me and met my gaze. “What do they have in common?” she asked, genuinely intrigued.

“They kill you from the inside out. They hollow you out until there is nothing left of you. And that’s when you have nothing left to lose,” I whispered.
“It all started that one winter day, the coldest and least forgiving I had ever seen, that reminded me of that spring, the last time I remembered being carelessly happy. This was, of course, before all of the drama ensued and shattered the peace of each section of my life.
I had lost friends. I had lost family. I had lost me.
I remember walking into school each day, unable to meet the gazes of any of my classmates, all because I was too scared, scared of asking for help, scared of anyone seeing the hopeless catastrophe inside of me.
I lost all that I had used to be. I was no longer the earth-shatteringly perfect girl my family expected me to be. But was it really my fault that I had trouble just getting out of bed? I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t breathe. I lost weight so rapidly since my anxiety kept me from eating, and no one cared enough to find out why. They noticed, oh, of course they did. But they never asked questions, and no one ever said anything to my face.
There was my obsession with control. Control over my eating, control over my sleeping, control over these petty things because I had no real control over anything. I couldn’t control who stayed in my life and who faded. It was a game, and I was being played.
The funny thing was, it turned almost into a competition. My friend and I were in the same predicament, yet we were always comparing, who lost more weight, who messed up more this time. It was never enough. And yet, we were draining from each other. I thought it was normal friendship to always be taking from the other, but I didn’t realize she was inhaling my unhealthy energy, too. I needed her, and I thought she needed me, too. Slowly and slowly, we began to fight, about little things at first, but it hurt when it grew into her picking at my insecurities.
The final straw came when she hurled my failures in front of my face. It wasn’t as if I was blind to them; I knew them just as well as anybody else. We lost sight of each other for a while, while never quite losing the other.
My days were awkward, and my nights were hell. Alone with my thoughts, they would whisper and choke me. Can’t do anything right, can you? Your family’s falling apart, you have no friends, and you’re all alone. You’re destined to be alone. No one could ever love you. You’re failing school, and you’re failing life. There is no future ahead of you.

It was exhausting to always be at war with yourself. Yet, unbelievably, I had grown comfortable with my depression. Like the quote, “intoxicated with the madness, I’m in love with my sadness,” it became a part of me just as much as I was parts of everyone else I had ever touched. I could not imagine living without this part of me. But it was suffocating me, eating away at everything I was and had once hoped to be. We could not coexist for long.


I was driven by these words, these stabs, these fears, in a world neither here nor there. I thought that they would end, but it stretched out to days, weeks, months, a year. I needed for it to stop, so I brought the end near. Paint a picture of a girl and color her wrists red. That’s where they found me, blood staining the bed.

I’m here because I needed to get away for a while. I needed to forget. But I realized you can never truly do that because this story still lingers within me. It’ll be a part of me as long as I live, because there are just some things that your body cannot erase.

When I woke up in that hospital bed the next day, I realized that I had been given another chance to live. No, I was not given a choice to be this way, yet I did have a choice whether I wanted to change not only who I was but also what I was to become.
Depression is like a storm cloud hanging over you, one that only you can see. Sometimes it rains for days and days on end. Sometimes it lasts until you forget what it’s like to genuinely believe. But sometimes, just sometimes, the clouds fade and you can feel the warmth of the sun, realizing that you get one life. Only one.”