School was always enjoyable for me when I was younger: I liked learning; I liked spending time with my friends at lunch or at recess; I liked being able to explore different interests through related arts (art, music, library, gym). When I was in 2nd grade I was accepted into both the math and reading Enriched Placement Programs (EPP). Math was always rather easy for me, everything for that class was in-class work (there was hardly ever homework), and I loved the EPP teacher for the subject, so I always enjoyed that time; however, part of the way through the year, EPP switched from math to reading. There was always homework for this class—anything from reading a few chapters to rather extensive projects—and one thing they don’t teach you in elementary school is time management. There were several times when, at only about 9 years of age, I was up until 2 or 3 a.m., crying because I had only just started this project which was due tomorrow, biting at my lip until it bled (which was a stress-induced habit that I harbored until middle school), trying to think up excuses for the next day as to why I didn’t have my project (“oh, I forgot it at home, I’ll bring it tomorrow” being the most common), feeling sick because of this ball of “guilt” that was stuck just below my stomach. It took me until sophomore year of high school – more than 5 years of this mostly school-centric fret – to realize the feeling I had labeled “guilt”, all this time, was me having anxiety attacks.

I only learned this a year ago when close to tears during choir class. I can’t remember what triggered it—whether it was a specific assignment or class, or just going to that particular school (I go to two schools, technically, and at this one, I was getting bullied in one of my classes – I was never bullied until high school), but one of my friends (who is diagnosed with anxiety, among other things) asked me what was wrong, and mentioned something about my symptoms sounding like those of anxiety. Suddenly the last several years of my educational career made sense: all those times I had cried over an assignment being too confusing; whenever I had felt sick at the thought of school, but not actually been ill; even those times I felt downright terrified to be around strangers (social anxiety). Another one of my friend’s—my best friend since 7th grade, in fact—had talked to me once about her anxiety: the meds she was on, her “doctor” (psychiatrist)...I didn’t understand any of it at the time. But here it was: that one moment in time when everything clicked together in an epiphanous conclusion. Now I had a name for the “guilt”, and now I could easily realize that I was not alone—but what did that help in the fact that school was still clawing away at my mental health? That the idea of multiple classes pressuring me for some “proof” that I was actually somehow retaining all this information they were trying to shove in through my ear through tests or papers or some other form of busy-work would get me so worked up to the point of panic, or, worse, cause me to shut down completely.

My depression never seemed real to me until I entered high school; mainly, because I had never really felt suicidal until then. And the days I have have been some of the scariest of my life. I learned that depression ran in my family—really, I learned that my mom had depression—several years prior, and only recently learned just how much of an impact that’s had on specific members, like my maternal grandfather, whom I never met, since he died of heart disease caused by his bulimia before I was born. Just last year, I had a plan. I always avoided anything tied to suicide—never cut myself, never learned to tie a noose, tried to avoid taking medication when possible—out of fear that one day I would slip from rational thinking and just...take the easy way out. And I especially avoided making any sort of plan. It would make it too real, too possible. And yet, here I was, October of 2013, sitting in my school during a free period, researching what pills you could take together to seriously harm or, I hoped, kill yourself. I was absolutely numb. A small voice in the back of my head was screaming, distraught and desperate for my attention, crying, “Why?” And I hardly heard her, hardly realized I was still at school, surrounded by my peers, searching how to end my own life on a cell phone. I was terrified by what I was doing—this primal instinct that ignored every piece of my better judgment, that jammed my speech and walled off any emotion—all along, it had been what I feared. And here I was. And who could I tell? I’ve never truly been diagnosed with depression, and I am so scared of pills being poured down my throat and being shoved in a room, sat down on a freezing leather couch across from some stranger who tells me to spill my life story across the floor as they fall asleep with their eyes open and vacuum all the money from my mom’s wallet. And I’m just sat there, jaw slack, watching as each minute of the hour ticks by, my vision blurred by tears and my throat stings with memories of a dysfunctional childhood: being shuffled between parents; being removed from my mother’s house for an entire summer because CPS deemed her “dangerous”; remembering how my “guilt” would get so much worse those nights I was away from her, and how I would cry myself to sleep when I felt so sick but was never ill, and how neither my dad nor step-“I know I’m not your real mom but I love you as if you were my own”-mom cared, how they would get so mad every time my nostrils flared as I fought not to cry; those moments that have haunted me for so long, that I have never so much as uttered to another living soul, that pass in front of my eyes those nights when I’ve fallen apart, that demand more tears that rack my body and knock more pieces of my soul across the room as I’m trying desperately to rebuild so I can just keep going, so I just see one more sunrise, struggle through one more day of school, because it’s all I can do.

I always find myself stuck between my own belief of "it's just high school"/"I'm just a teenager" and adults' belief that the choices I make now and grades I get now will somehow determine the outcome of the rest of my life. And it's the latter that is pressed upon me; that chokes me and twists my heart and racks my brain until I see no worth in myself outside of a measly letter grade. There are days when my anxiety gets the better of me and it’s all I can do not to break down crying at school because I can see no worthwhile future for myself. And there are nights that depression rules all capable function and I cannot bring myself to care enough to even try to meet a deadline. Those are the nights that the fear—my only driving force that might get me through school, the fear of getting yelled at—is silenced. And it feels so good not to care. And it hurts so much not to care. And I lie on my bed and cannot move because high school is so easy and so meaningless in the scheme of things, and yet here I am, barely inching my way to graduation, and none of this will matter in a few years, and I am so terrified of life after high school because all I was taught to do, and all I know how to do, is inch my way through my education. And I cannot finish reading Hamlet, or figure out this math homework, or recall the capital of Laos, because I am terrified.