I have depression. I feel it nibble me up slowly from the inside out, and corrodes away my relationships and productivity. It changes my daily life, and the way I experience a school day is much different from how my friends do.

Dark mornings are the worst. I wake up miserably from an inadequate night’s sleep. The alarm is like a shotgun, and my mind is off. Immediately I accidentally make a list of what I am anxious about, what is going to stress me out, how many people I am afraid of, and at what time I can sleep.

I force my body through a morning routine that makes me appear less like a ghost. I drink coffee every morning. I do not like the taste of it, but I am afraid that without the caffeine, I will fall asleep in class. I get on the school bus in the cold.

At school, the hallways are filled with people who could kill me with a handful of words if they really wanted to. Everything is frighteningly overwhelming: overhead lights, zig-zag walkers, new assignments. I put in earphones to isolate and meditate in the Word of the Lord.

Slowly, I slip away; I spend most of the day feeling completely helpless. My heart rate picks up for no reason and I feel as though I cannot get adequate oxygen. I try to anchor my angst in notebook pages. I have to fight myself more fervently with each progressive class period. My mind tries to tell me of how inferior I am, and of how desperately I need to flee from the classroom. My breathing grows quicker and in about thirty seconds I am thoroughly convinced that everything is wrong. I know that these pressing thoughts are irrational, but my brain is apathetic toward logic. The battle is continuous and it exhausts me. If the room starts spinning, I relent.

When I get home, I almost always crawl immediately back into my bed. There, I am warm. Nothing is expected of me. No one watches me. In the dim stillness I can distract my bullet train thoughts with fiction until my mind quiets. Sometimes I fall asleep.

While I am at home, tedious hours of frustration go by. I often sit in one place on the floor for hours without meaning to. Responsibility looms over me, threatening to topple and crack me open. I need to rise in order to be productive, but it feels like I am glued to the floor. I marathon through the Netflix lives of other people who have things to look forward to.

I often realize all at once that I am awake at twelve o’clock in the morning.  A sadistic voice in my head reminds me that it feels oddly good to feel the weight of sleep deprivation after a night of emotional deconstruction. I stay up doing homework because I feel like I need to succeed in something. I stay up writing because of the thoughts, words, and emotions that bounce awkwardly inside of me, stumbling to find their ways out. I stay up feeling like each sob is wrenching me open. My mother comes in to plea with me to go to sleep, the worry reflected in her wide eyes.

Eventually fatigued rationalism wins out, and I drag myself through the motions of personal maintenance before fainting back into bed. I wake up before the sun rises.

The routine makes me feel helpless, and like I have been stripped of motivation and identity. I feel unequipped to handle schoolwork and social situations. Despite my best efforts, tears leak from my eyes regularly. I feel ostracized and overcome.

Approximately one in every twelve American teenagers suffer from depression; many others share my story. They walk through school hallways with held tongues, feeling outstandingly alone. It is not easy to talk about depression. Some people just do not want to acknowledge it; it makes them uncomfortable to see a fundamental flaw so clearly breaking down another human being. Others simply do not know what to say. It is nearly impossible to understand depression unless one has experienced it. I can tell my friends over and over again how trapped I feel, but they have nothing constructive to offer; they do not understand that when they change the subject, I feel encaged.