A story. What do you think of when you hear that? A made up tale, a fable, something to make you laugh or smile. A story to make you cry or sigh. But it is a story, it isn't real or at least it shouldn't be. Those are the best kind of stories ones you know aren't true, so when you are finished, no matter how it ends, you can say it isn't real. I wish this story was fake. That it was a story that I came up with from my imagination and didn't live myself. I was twelve, life was exactly how it was supposed to be. Fun, happy, carefree…until my grandmother died.

June 19, 2011.  At the time it seemed like the beginning of the end, for everything I knew and everything I'd come to love. I had no idea what was coming though I'm sure a lot of you could guess, depression. That was the next step in my life. Depression took a large part of my teenage years. It made life unbearable for quite some time, the first year of my depression was the first year going on without my grandma.

Before going any further, I want to explain the relationship I had with my grandma. You have to understand and not play me off as weak, my grandma lived next door. I spent most of my time at her house. Every single morning I would stop by her house and talk to her before school to tell her goodbye and that I loved her. When we went to the door to leave, she would smile and say, “See you later alligator.” And I would giggle and respond “In awhile crocodile.” We were extremely close. When she died it was more than just upsetting to me. It was devastating, a disaster. So though I may have been weak to a degree for not handling it like I should've but I wasn't the type of person who wasn't strong enough to handle situations. I spent approximately four years in a constant state of depression, it seemed all the light in my world had been sucked out in a matter of moments and life just wasn't getting any better. There was no hope, no happiness, and long days for four years. It wasn't until after this depression when I learned so many lessons about it. Less than a year ago, I came out of my depression and now that I look back at it, I realize so many things.

First of all, I don’t regret going through it. I regret not handling it better but I won’t regret my depression. I hit an indescribable low in my life and the fact that I came out of it made me stronger. It made me be able to help more people and understand others better because I can relate to sadness better than I ever have before. I can help people through it in a way others had trouble helping me. In this way it was definitely a life-changing event but this is not my lesson learned. This is where I tell you the main lesson of my story.

The lesson I learned is, it is alright to grieve when you lose someone but don’t let it consume you. In this I mean grieving is healthy, it is important to let it out and allow yourself to feel the pain that something has caused you, but don’t let it control your life. Don’t let your grieving become more than what it should be, don’t let it go past healthy and into depression or anxiety. The past is always there, the scars it leaves aren’t always visible but the future is always bright no matter what your story is… The future remains new and hopeful because your past doesn’t change the future you change the future for yourself. How you live out tomorrow is your choice and your choice alone. In a way my depression taught me not to let my past define me and not to let my future depend on the past.