Depression
Every child has their fear of the monsters under the bed. Once they scream for their mom and dad, the monster goes away. What they don’t know, is that the monster didn’t go away, it just went into hideaway. Where you ask? In your Head. You just don’t know it yet.

Depression is a big thing, yet people don’t understand why it is.  Today, if you ask someone about depression, who isn’t dealing with it, they will probably give you the answer of, “It’s when someone is sad.” Someone who hasn’t experienced depression, doesn’t know what people are going through, yet they’ll try to understand. They even try to help, but most the time, they are making the problem worse. This is my story, what I’ve gone through, what I think 24/7. Yes, it is depressing, but I hope this will help you get the feel of what depression is, why you shouldn’t just ignore it. It’s a big that’s happening right now, and ignoring it won’t make the problem go away. It’s going to make it bigger. 

Darkness
There are four types of people in this world: 1) People who think you’re depressed to only get attention. (The Bully) 2) People who tell you to be happy but don’t do anything else to help (The Friend/Family member) 3) People who give you “happy” medicine (The Doctor) and 4) People who experience depression itself (You).  Most teens experience depression, with the intent of being depressed. I think it’s more painful once you realize you are suffering from depression, after four years of suffering from it. You know you’ve been sad; you just didn’t know the word. You know, the word, that speaks for all those sad kids out there who need a friend, but don’t have one or the friends they have won’t help. Who wants to cry once they get straight home, but can’t because their parents don’t know how they have been feeling. It’s people like those who make me wonder, “I’m not the only one.” I’ve gone through my mom and dad’s divorce and my dad and step-mother’s divorce, my best, and my only friend moving away at the end of my 3rd grade year, or my biggest crush asking my friend out on a date, and realizing it was never going to happen with him. Those are few things that make me realize, how am I still alive today?

You know when you hear intense music on the television, something big is about to happen? That's how it feels when everything is just being thrown at you all at once, and all you can do is fall to the ground, cover your face and cry. Then the music becomes louder and louder, until…. It stops. All the harsh words, bad friends, are gone, everything bad had vanished. You look up to see a hand reaching out to you, it’s a friend, helping you. You take their hand, and all nightmares go away, for a little bit that is.

Depression isn’t like some flu; it won’t just go away after a while. Depression is like cancer; you either barely make it alive, or not at all. It takes you away from everything you love; sports, friends, relationships, family. All you get from depression is isolation and, sometimes, battle scars. It devours you whole and you can’t do anything about it! Only scream in pain and sorrow from the horrifying thing that just happened to you, or has for the longest time. Other people who are feeling depressed try to help others who are “feeling the same pain as you,” but depression is like a snowflake, each pain is different in their own way. It’s like saying that you and your friend look exactly alike. But, in reality, you have a blue shirt and your friend has a red shirt.

When you feel depressed, it feels like you want to scream. But you know if you do you’ll cause attention and you don’t want that to happen. It feels like there is pressure on your chest, slowly suffocating you with your own thoughts and actions. It’s like you're dying, but you're still breathing every. Little. Breath. It’s those hard parts when you get anxiety on an unknown situation. Or being picked on, for being yourself. When it happens so much, you just join the ones who pick on you, and you start to pick on yourself. It’s also hard to keep such a big secret from your parents, but you just don’t know how to tell them you're depressed. It’s a burden to keep in hideaway, but you just don’t know how to tell them. They tell you, “If you have any suicidal thoughts, please tell us.”  But I don’t have those thoughts. I’m just depressed and everything gets me down.

When people are depressed, they are usually that way because they are being bullied by another person. Yet, I was different.  When I became depressed, my conscience became my friend and my bully, kind of like a frenemy, but not really. It was telling me what a conscience should be doing; making you stay away from trouble. But it was also saying cruel words to me; boy, fat, ugly, stupid, unlovable, etc. Even though none of those were true, my mind was making me wonder if that’s what people think of me like that. So I became insecure, alone, covered-up, never asked for help in class, didn’t tell anyone my crush, grew my hair out and blocked everything out with my music. I stayed with my music, and my music stayed with me.

Alone
You know that poor, little, lonely, 4th grade girl sitting all alone on the bench waiting for the bell to ring, to go back to class, so the other kids wouldn’t notice that she had no friends, no one to play with her during the best part of a 4th graders’ school time. Even when school is over, she has to figure out which home she is going to, so she can look for that car. And then talk about her day to her family, and realize years later, that they don’t really listen. They are too busy taking her sister and brother to their sports, so she stays home. Then goes to bed and starts the day all over again, hoping that it will be better, but in the end, it never is. I was that fourth grade girl.

I think the 5th grade year was the worst year, I spent most of recess sitting on a bench, and the rest of the recess trying to fit into a group of people who were probably not the nicest to me. But I didn’t want to be a lonely outcast. Because back then I actually cared what people thought of me. The 6th grade year got a bit better, I made a friend. But also got a crush on someone who I knew, wasn’t going to happen. But we did do this thing for valentine’s day where we, went around the classroom and put a compliment on a heart and give to every person in class. Reading those compliments brighten my day and it made me feel better, not just because of the compliments, from the people who said the compliments.

After the 6th grade year it started to go uphill; I made friends, I was doing alright in class. But when I made it to the top of the hill. I got pushed down and was back in hell. At the end of my 7th grade year, I got a haircut, I looked like a boy, and people called me that, not all the time, but sometimes, yet it still felt like a boulder falling onto me and crushing me, just after I fell off a cliff. Why are people so rude? They should know I can’t help that I had to get a boy haircut.

The first time I felt real trauma, real heartbreak was in the 7th grade, a month away from Christmas. My grandpa hadn’t been doing so well, so my dad and my siblings tried to drive down to see the family right after school, but my grandpa’s condition was getting worse so my dad left during school. Couple hours later we get a call from my dad saying that he died. Next thing I know, it was silent in the room, all you could hear was the tears falling from me and my siblings faces. The next day, during school assembly, we said prayers for my grandfather. All I could do at that moment was hear my sister cry and cry. I closed my eyes hoping that I would wake up from this long terrible nightmare. Two and a half years later, and I’m still waiting.

At the beginning of 8th grade, school became very stressful; graduation, still trying to find out where I belonged, but mostly, it was when I found out that I was really depressed and not just sad. It also didn’t help for being accused of something, that I didn’t do, all I had been doing was breathing. But I guess it didn’t matter on what they thought I was feeling when they accused me of it, every day. Now, I cautiously think of what I am going to say, hopefully it not being offended to anyone... Graduation was probably the hardest part of 8th grade. I had to leave my best friends to go to a school that the only people I would know was my sister and my brother. I didn’t remember much of graduation, only that I was feeling depressed because I thought that I wouldn’t see my friends ever again, and just thinking of that, was terrifying.

Most people who experience depression, go through insecurity, thinking that they are fat when they aren’t or ugly when they are beautiful. Everyone around them says they are skinny and beautiful, but they just don’t hear it.

At the beginning of my 9th grade year, I couldn’t even get the courage to tell my friends that I was depressed, so I just wrote everything down:
“Ever since I was little, I never fit in. I was always that kid who would be sitting alone and just watching all the other kids play with their friends and have fun. I was also the only kid who had acne, and chose not to wear makeup. Everyone thinks that makeup makes you pretty, it’s not! It does the opposite. It makes you fake and not your true self. Sure all the guys say, “i like a girl who is pretty and nice on this inside, it doesn’t matter is they have flaws or not.” That’s incorrect, when they say that, they really mean, “I want a girl who is pretty, skinny and has boobs.” They never really mean what they say. It hurts me inside that they say that. Sure some guys don’t say that, but I’m talking to the guys who actually do that, not saying you do, but to those guys out there in the world.  Everyone around me, I’m so different from them, they don’t get me. I’m just a girl with short brown hair, and some people might think I’m gay. I’m not, just because I have boy short hair, doesn’t mean I’m gay! I don’t know what to do now! I know when people say that, that they are about to attempt suicide, but I don’t want to die! I just… I don’t know what to do. I never wanted to be alone…. It just happened.”

Fear
Fears can get the best of you, they take you down, and drag you into a place you are unfamiliar with, void. Acrophobia: the fear of heights. Ophidiophobia: Fear of snakes. Haphephobia: fear of a stranger touching you. Nyctophobia: Fear of the dark. Social Phobia: Fear of when a person feels they may be closely watched and judged by others. And Monophobia: fear of being alone These are just some fears I have come to be afraid of. A difference between monophobia, Social phobia and the other fears is that I have come to embrace being alone and people judging me. While the other ones still give me great anxiety.

When I was younger, I thought I was dyslexic, for a while, I kind of stopped believing it, then a few months ago, it came back to me, i coudln’t spell rite werds as i coudl fro some straneg rasoen or I’d forget and just skip right over them or say say words twice in a row. I guess it’s just how my brain works, and people around me think I’m stupid because of it.

Help?
People don’t help the problem of depression because they don’t know how to solve it since every single time, it’s different. But they just have to look closer at the problem.

Other than name calling, I’ve never been bullied. But it doesn’t mean that I never experienced it. My friend was bullied and, to this day, she never knew what those boys were calling her. They always did it behind her back, never to her face. But that didn’t stop my other friend and I from finding out. A guy, who wasn’t doing the name calling, told us what was happening and who was saying it. We had to tell the teacher twice about it for it to really stop. After, we decided not to tell her, we didn’t want her to feel and experience the pain that my friend and I felt when we found out.

The hard part in life is to have a friend, who hates your other friend, and you're the one in pain. Because there is no way to solve it, and you have no clue what to do, but to have them stay away as far as possible. But then, it gets worse; they make you choose a side. But I can’t choose, I can’t, I just… can’t.

I had an online friend who was suffering from depression just like me, but it seemed to hurt her more. I tried a few times to make her feel better. It worked, but for only a little bit. About a week later her sister gets online through my friend’s account and tells us, that she tried to commit suicide. I was on the verge of tears, couldn’t breathe, and was so scared in fear I could barely move, just because some random person I met over the internet could’ve been dead right now, and I couldn’t do anything. Her sister types one more thing, “We are waiting for her to wake up right now.” I sighed in relief to hear the news that she was going to make it. After a couple of weeks of recovering, she got back online and I was glad to see her. This one girl changed my entire life just by a choice she made for herself. This one girl made me think twice about how you should live your life, and you shouldn’t get mad at the little things in life.
It’s hard when two of your best friends are fighting, they make you pick a side, when you both love them equally, and you just can’t choose. Two of my friends were bullying each other. I didn’t do anything about it, because they never told me. They were telling me rude things about each other when they weren’t there, but I didn’t think it was a big problem. That was until one of them spoke up. He said that when I wasn’t there my other friend was calling him names, and picking on him. My other friend said that he was bragging to her and rubbing stuff in her face, stuff that she couldn’t accomplish but he always did. When my friend spoke up, he also said what was happening to him when all this was happening, he was coming depressed, and started to hurt himself, a way that made my heart sink into a bottomless pit. Once he left, I wrote him so many things why he shouldn’t be depressed, and the story when I started being depressed. I told him things like, “I know you're hurting right now, but I know you’ll win this fight” and, “Depression isn’t a choice, no one deserves to feel pain, the way we feel right now, no matter what the reason.” He also seemed to enjoy the music the way I did, so I gave some links to a song for him that always made me feel better. Once he read it, he started to feel better and the two apologized to each other. I felt happy that I fixed a situation that had no relation to me.

With all the help I’ve done in my life for my friends or anyone, I feel like that’s the only happiness I will earn, and frankly, I’m okay with that! It brings me joy, when the person I am helping is happy, because when they are happy, I am happy. And putting a smile on someone else’s face warms my heart like hot chocolate and fire on a cold, rainy, winter’s day. Happiness is key to a healthy, long life. But the hard part to the happy, healthy life is being happy. Then you begin to fall into a deep, dark, hole of despair that feels like you want to die, but you don’t die, because you’d rather suffer in this sorrowful pain and ending your life is a permanent option to this semi-temporary situation.

Will it ever end?
Let me ask you a question, do you think people like being depressed? They hate it! They hate how it just controls their body and they can’t do anything about it! It’s their own little demon, that just possesses them whenever and leaves whenever, and they don’t know when it will happen. I hate that when people really think of depression, one word pops up into their mind, “suicide” not everyone wants to die! I don’t, I want to live a happy life, I just can’t because of those people out there, who don’t give people a chance. Everyone has their monsters, not under your bed, but in your head.