"I Am Living"

I was 13 years old when I got diagnosed with depression. The anxiety followed shortly after. During this time I would call myself nocturnal. I was on a strict sleep schedule of wake up at 6pm, eat “dinner” that was actually my breakfast, stay up all night, and once I heard my mom wake up at 7am I would go to sleep. My depression started getting worse and I eventually stopped going downstairs for those dinner meals, and soon I stopped leaving my bed all together. I started to feel so numb and to feel anything at all I started to self harm. I hated what I was doing and knew I should stop but I just wanted to feel anything again. After months of this happening I felt one single thing. The pain of my mom. I thought about how my mom would feel if she knew I was hurting myself. The thought of me bringing pain on my mom was enough to stop me, and of course it wasn’t really that easy. I relapsed and craved and struggled but in the end I came out on top. I thought that was it but what I didn’t realize was depression is a life long illness and while I had almost made it 1 year self harm clean I started to slip into the worst depression of my life and one night I wrote everyone a cared about suicide notes. I decided to swallow pills, but I guess it wasn’t enough because I woke up the next morning. For the next 2 weeks I was drowsy but alive so I never told anyone about that night. Now looking back a year later and almost 2 years clean of self harm, I still feel my depression and anxiety all the time but I am so unbelievably proud to say I am alive. I am living and there is so much to my story but at the end of the day something has kept me on this earth so whatever it is I’m taking it as my second chance.

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