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Hi. my name is not important. I’m 16 and I hate myself. I hate everything. I hate my life. Nothing makes me happy anymore. I am negative and don’t even see the glass in that “Do you see the glass half full or half empty?” question. Wow, who knew I would end up like this? I for sure didn’t know that I’d be so broken. Jeepers.

Oh, I wasn’t always like this by the way. I grew up in a great household. There’s my dad, my mom, and my older sister. My dad’s a middle school teacher and my mom’s a piano teacher. My sister is in college and doesn’t live with us anymore. My life up until 8th grade was amazing. I felt happy, had a lot of friends, and loved everything about being alive. I was smart and had straight A’s. I played sports and did things I loved. My life was great to be honest. I had a loving family and loving friends. What more could I ask for?

But yeah, unfortunately, my freshman year, I got depressed. Yay for my awesome genetics!!!! It’s strange. How depression just slowly enters your life. You start feeling sad. Very sad and very often. It’s not like the sadness you feel when you get into a fight with your friend, or the sadness when someone passes away. It’s a sadness that can’t really be explained. You just start hating yourself. You begin to think about all the mistakes you’ve made in your life. Your own voice in your head tells you how stupid and insignificant you are. And from there it gets worse. You start asking yourself why you’re alive. Wondering why you’re the only one suffering while everyone else is enjoying life. All your friends stop talking to you and tell you that you’re being sad for no reason.

That’s what hurts the most. Not being understood. You can tell people how you feel depressed, but no one cares. They think you want attention. They think you’re exaggerating. As you open up to your friends and tell them how much you hate yourself and how you think about dying 24/7, they don’t care. They ignore your problems like books on an old bookshelf. They think they understand the book because they’ve read it hundreds of times, but in reality, they never even cared to actually stop and think about what the author was trying to say.

Depression makes you feel alone and unloved. Worthless and ugly. You feel like dying every single day. You don’t understand why you’re here and you think everyone thinks you’re annoying. Even with a year of therapy and group therapy, medications, and even outpatient programs; three years later, I’m still sad. I didn’t really explain my entire mental illness though. It’s not just depression, it’s Bipolar II disorder.

Woah anonymous author!  Slow down, hold your horses! Does that mean that one moment you’ll be happy and all of the sudden you’ll be angry? Is it just like the movies?

Um, yes and no. Pretty much it means that I can be happy for a few days, even weeks, but then be super depressed all of the sudden. The way I see it is, I finally think I am happy, but then the depression hits me and reminds me that I am different than other people. Hey, listen. I am a strong believer of “Different is good,” but when it comes to this kind of different, not so much. Having to take meds everyday. Trying to keep this stupid mask on of “Oh yeah I am totally okay and not dying on the inside” is hard.

But, this isn’t a story of me talking about how much I hate myself (Trust me, that could be a whole separate story by itself) but about the time I fell in love. And oh, how that changed my life.