My dear old friend depression used to visit me a couple times a year, then she started coming around once a month, eventually she just moved in. Now I can’t imagine not living with her by my side. She sleeps in my bed, she eats my food, she goes out with my friends. At first she didn’t seem too bad, but then she infiltrated the deepest part of my mind and took over my body. Shortly after that I began to walk around like a zombie. Everything seemed to be happening so fast paced around me while I sat there and watched as if it were in slow motion. I wasn’t me, or maybe I was me and I just didn’t want to accept it at the time. The thing about my friend depression is that she started getting furious when I hung out with anyone but her. She told me all these cruel things like how I wasn’t good enough and how no one really liked me. She said all these hurtful things until I stopped going out with them. In fact, I stopped hanging out with everyone. It hurt to fight her. She would hold me down to the bed and I would struggle to get up. She made my body so exhausted. Eventually I just quit fighting her. I fell into her spell and that’s where I stayed. I screamed for help in my head but couldn’t ask for it out loud. She wouldn’t let me. People didn’t understand it. I was told to, “Get over it” and to “Move on,” but she wouldn’t let me. I was no longer in control of my life. I was a prisoner in my mind while something else ran me. I felt like a puppet whose strings were being pulled. I realized that depression wasn’t my friend and that I was in a toxic relationship. I tried to kick her out but by that point I was so tired of fighting, I didn’t even have the strength to make her leave. She destroyed me. I let her destroy me because I thought she was a friend. I, like many others, just wanted to be free. The thing about my friend depression is that I’m not the only person who she visited. She has been around the world and has millions of friends who she tortures the way she tortured me. Not many people think she is a threat, they say she isn’t even real. What they don’t know is that she is real, she just isn’t a person. Depression is a disease that needs to be talked about more openly.

Haley is a 19 year old who have lived with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder for the past six years. Now she lives to spread the story about how it makes you feel.