I've been asked a lot what it’s like to suffer from depression. I tell them it’s like drowning in a pool of self-pity and watching those around you breathe without a second thought. It comes so easy to them, they don’t know the struggle I go through, and they have no idea of the pain it takes on my mind to just breathe. To breathe becomes a heart wrenching task in its self. I wish they knew the hundred things I've had to overcome by the time the nine o clock bell rings in the morning and there day only begins. Not for self-pity, but so they could understand why sometimes I simply snap, why I don’t always seem there. I wish they knew about depression. I wish they didn't see it as a personality defect but as an illness. They think I've lost it; I'm crazy, they think I'm constantly having a mental breakdown. Maybe I am, maybe I am crazy. No, I'm not, I know it, deep, deep down I'm still me. It’s the depression that’s crazy, not me. I want to make that clear. I want people to see me, not the depression. I can see how you might be mistaken. I know that it consumes me; I can see myself too, after I come out of that place. I can see how bad I was. I remember looking in my bedroom mirror assured that the person looking back at me was I. Moving my left arm anticlockwise to see would the image in front of me duplicate.

There were so many things that I wasn’t ready to face. I certainly wasn’t ready to face an illness that mature, “grown up” people found debilitating. I guess it made me mature, it made me grow up. Depression doesn't wait until you’re ready for it to strike, there is no minimum or maximum age requirements, it chooses who it preys on, no one is safe from its claws.

It’s easy to plummet into an endless why me? You can drown yourself in them, they can even end up as your only comfort blanket and that’s a scary place to be, and you can’t even tell anymore because you’re too focused on trying to take another breath. Another sweet refreshing breath. But what happens when depression becomes the oxygen? That when we’ve got a problem. That’s when you’ve got your mom and dad on the end of your bed telling you there worried about you, and how you are the only person who can help yourself. What if I want to stay here, what if depression has become my only friend, and I just simply can’t say goodbye forever. We can take as many breaks from each other as we want; as it wants, but we’ll never have our final goodbye. We’ll never part ways forever. The only forever will be depression and me together in my room, alone, sitting on the window pane at night looking out at the beacons of hope that come from passing cars. Maybe this one will magically see me through the sky high tees, pull over and come and wrap me in their arms and tell me it will all be okay. They’ll take me away, treat me like a wounded bird, then, with their nourishment and the gift of time, I’ll fly as high as those sky high trees, higher than them, further than them, no one will be able to drag me down, I’ll be invincible.