She’s a phoenix. She starts as a small egg and slowly cracks open her shell… and when the shell is open, and the growing process starts, the fire burns brighter and brighter until it consumes and leaves a charred a hollow wake where the nest once was. And then, slowly, it begins to simmer down, allowing the nest to be rebuilt, twig by twig. And the phoenix dies and recedes back into a shell, dormant for months. Once more, it slowly breaks through that shell again. And the process eats and eats at the nest until it is afraid to rebuild itself— what’s the point when the nest’s seemingly permanent tenant will only burn it back down within a couple of months? Why rebuild just to feel the fire again?

The phoenix rips at me. It makes my fingers shake to type this, my poised pinky trembling above the keyboard as I hunt and peck for every letter. I don’t like to talk about the phoenix… And what’s ironic about every shred of this is that I keep calling my monster a ‘phoenix’ when it’s anything but a bright, warm fire. It’s my darkest dark— my midnight. I have a singular friend that knows about the way things eat at me, and she and I call it my Grey. It’s a block of dry watercolor paint, waiting for someone to add water so it can leak down the pale page of an otherwise happy person. And it’s so miserable to feel it stain me but I know that I have to push past it and paint around the grey. I have to paint a better picture.

My friend thinks she’s diagnosed me as having Seasonal Depression Disorder— she’s had it her whole life, and she was just told about it a few years ago. She thinks it’s the reason why it’s so hard for me to handle certain things as it is, and then when the winter months hit and the sun is so dim behind clouds, I collapse in on myself. It’s like it doesn’t matter how long I lay in my bed, I’m still so tired I can’t see anything but a grey film. And it’s not as if I’m even sleeping when I’m in my bed; I’ve always had trouble getting a good’s night rest, but when I feel Grey I don’t sleep at all… maybe thirty minutes here, twenty the next few hours. It eats at me, all the while making me feel like I can’t eat. I don’t know how to interact with my best friends… everything feels dry and like I’m trying too hard. And I feel hours pass with no feeling.

The first time I ever realized something was wrong was when I was in the seventh grade— I remember sitting on the shower floor, praying out loud to God that He would tell me I had a purpose. I felt so empty and worn and I sat on the shower floor for two hours, completely oblivious to the absence of hot water because I’d used it all. That went on for weeks. I didn’t want to talk to anybody about it and I couldn’t even sit down with my family— I left the dinner table early every night, excusing myself with complaints of a stomach ache. And I finally crawled into bed with my mother one night and woke her up, shamefully hiding in the pillow because I felt so defective. She rolled over and looked at me with her eyes shadowed by her curled hair and the night’s cover. She was warm with sleep and she mumbled my name, asking me what was wrong. All I did was start crying, and my mom held me to her and just stayed quiet, stroking my hair and rubbing my arm until I could explain myself.

“I don’t feel like me.”

Her voice was a mumble, muffled by my hair as she kissed my head. “What do you mean?”

“I feel… hollow. I feel like I’m not here.” Every word I coughed out was thick with tears and confusion, every word forced and miserable.

And she prayed with me, and she held onto me and promised me that I could talk to her about everything… But since the seventh grade, I haven’t. I haven’t told her about the way it kills me to hear about death and broken lives. It shreds me to think of a love lost in battle or a family torn by cancer. And I should be able to handle it because things happen in life. Life is going to throw me bowling balls and expect me to juggle them; it’s part of growing up and learning to cope in life. But I just… can’t.

I don’t read anymore. I used to read a book every day. I used to dive into anything with such an eagerness to feel the lives of the characters that I would sit in the blanket cupboard in our hallway and read for hours. I can’t anymore— I can’t even watch a movie without first reading a full synopsis and being ensured that there’s a happy ending. I have to monitor the music I listen to and the TV shows I watch, and that’s not how I want to live life. I want it to be the way it used to be. When I was strong.

Everything has changed since the seventh grade. Since then, I’ve dropped a friendship only to pick up several stronger, healthier friendships. I’ve found myself in faith and where I fit in with art and I can truly say that I am a genuinely happy person; I love to laugh and spend time with my friends, and I’m proud of our senses of humor and the way we know each other. Only, my friends don’t know everything about me. They don’t know that I write because I need to.

My second monster has evolved from my first.

I have written over one thousand, three-hundred pages on my laptop— not even counting the masses of notebooks I go through— about the lives of characters I am in love with. Most things I hear are interpreted as, “Jacob would say that,” or, “That’s something Kenedy would do.” I write lives for a specific set of characters that I am so proud of and so attached to writing about, and it’s those characters and that habit that have brought me out of my Grey so many times before.

I didn’t know that writing could combat the frustration until my sophomore year, when I took a creating writing class. At that point, I’d been so miserable with not knowing what was wrong with me that I wasn’t eating or talking to any of my friends. It was the first time since the seventh grade that I’d hurt that way and I found my escape when my teacher gave an assignment to write nonstop for ten minutes— I went through six pages of notebook paper, front and back, and scribbled a character that understood what I felt. I made the character a life and a will and from that day, I went through a notebook every month, sometimes every two weeks.

I’ve used writing as my way to cope with not wanting to read anymore, and in that way I’ve enabled my first monster to take away my freedoms. I’ve let the phoenix change my life so that I can’t focus on classroom activities or things that are truly important— I’m busy day-dreaming about story plots and characters to pull me out of whatever pain I’m afraid is going to surface.

Perhaps the second monster isn’t truly horrible— it’s the reason I’ve found my place in so many things and it’s been the way I’ve processed my thoughts and feelings for so long. The only truly monstrous thing about writing is the way it’s stripped my attention span. Writing is my passion and my dream and maybe it’s the phoenix telling me that I can never publish what I write because it isn’t any good... but maybe it’s also the phoenix that will wrap its wings around my work and offer a place of escape for someone that feels the same way I have. Maybe it’s the burden of the phoenix that will push me to do something about my life, push me to make my dreams happen, push me to overcome.

I’ve never wanted to talk to anyone about the reason I write. I’ve always felt defective— no one in my family has ever hinted to having a depression disorder. No one in my family has ever had a vice like writing... and I know that the way I feel has to be something more than normal teenage angst. I know that because it can’t be normal to feel so dead over things so small. My best friend’s mom likes to tell me, “It’s not your job to care about everyone in the world,” but just the same, sometimes it feels like their problems weigh on my chest anyway. And I want to be free of that. I want to feel normal. I want to look my monsters dead in the eyes, call them what they are, and tell them that I will not let them change who I become. They will not determine my life.