I’ve been reading through people’s stories, their struggles, their battles, and one thing repeatedly stands out to me. Most people start their stories with the age that they felt their mental illness really took a hold, usually around 13 or 15, thereabouts. But what if you always felt it? What if from the young ages [...]
Talking about mental illness is weird. Everyone has these ideas of what depression looks like, what anxiety looks like, what schizophrenia looks like... But really they wouldn't be able to tell someone with these illnesses if they knocked on their front door. Imagine your house is on fire. It's been burning for a long time, [...]
It's breaking my heart...this divide. It's tearing me apart. The drama, the perceived slights, the resentment and bickering...this isn't what I imagined we would become. Growing up, it was always us. Sisters. Blood is thicker than water. Our parents raised us to look out for one another, to support one another in each new endeavor. [...]
Author’s note: This is the full text of a long-hand letter I wrote to myself six years ago, when in the middle of an acute period of depression. While I cannot vouch for the trustworthiness of the narrator, I share it because its a raw first-person account of what it feels to be depressed. P.S. [...]
How Much More How much hatred is in my heart that I’m ripping my body to shreds? How much pain do I think I deserve that I revel in the stinging nettles blooming on my arms? How much time goes and time goes as I stare into the air, eyes glazed with fog, hands carved [...]
Kevin Hall's ruminations on his own suicidal thoughts. Yesterday—in front of my two younger children—I nearly choked to death on my grilled chicken dinner. What should have simply released a heavy sigh of relief in my wife’s ear at bedtime contorted into a sleepless night of revisiting another recent near miss: Last month I wanted [...]
The First Day of the Rest of My Life For as long as I can remember, I’ve always felt as if I were living two different lives: the life everyone sees and the life that only I see. In the life that everyone sees, I am a friend, a daughter, a sister, a straight-A student [...]
For as long as I can remember I have felt as if I don't belong, like I just don't fit in this world. I think that these feelings haunting me everyday are something that seriously contributed to the development of my depression. I have a hard time even pin pointing when this started but I'm [...]
When I was in high school, I would wear a bow in my hair every day. It became my signature. People in my community knew me as the happy girl with the bow. I was bow girl. When I was seventeen, my depressive symptoms arrived. I felt miserable and I didn't know why. I didn't [...]
Ever since I have made my way out the burning heaps of OCD that used to surround me, I have found myself in a constant state of fearing the relapse. When I read my journal entries dating back to when I used to struggle with my OCD, I feel happy that I am not going [...]
