It’s been about a month since I’ve wrote any words other than papers and assignments for my school. I haven’t wanted to write, simply because I didn’t want to face my thoughts. As my sophmore year in high school is coming to a close, I think about all that has happened in the past few months. In the first few weeks of school, one of my best friends from middle school committed suicide. Shortly after his death I went out on a rainy night with a few of my friends and met one person who instilled the smallest shred of hope into this empty vessel of my body, with a kiss. I spent a lot of time with him, and thought maybe I could be with him for the rest of my life. Towards the winter, I became rather close with this one freshman in my school, much closer than I ever thought I could be with someone, only to find out she would die within two months of terminal cancer. But as I prayed and prayed, and held on to her as tight as possible, a miracle occurred and she fought out her cancer. It has come back ,but I am hopeful she will fight through it again. My boyfriend and I broke up exactly one month ago since today, and I didn’t think I could make it without taking another trip to the hospital, but I did. This year I dealt with extreme anxiety which lead to smoking cigarettes and forcing alcohol down my throat to drown the voices in my head out. The night I drank alcohol I cut my wrist 17 times and didn’t feel a thing. I’ve cut myself since 7th grade and have been psychologically damaged from the decisions my family members have made when I was a baby, and growing up. My brain does not and never has produced serotonin, the neurotransmitter that makes a person physically happy. I haven’t felt it before. This year I wrote letters to people saying all the things I wanted them to remember me for, because I was going to kill myself. One night I had a bottle of pills in my hand and nearly shoved them down my throat when an instinct greater than my impulse fled me down my stairs and burst into my parents bedroom, and that was the night my father took me to a mental hospital emergency room where I stayed overnight and was diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety. I was in therapy for a year before that night, but after the hospital visit I was required to go to therapy 3 times a week and have a psychiatrist to study me more, because they thought I was a developing schizophrenic. I was put on 25 mg of Zoloft, and I am now up to 50 mg. My boyfriend and friends knew I struggled with depression, but not in so much detail because I didn’t want to scare them; because frankly I was quite frightened of myself. This year I overloaded my schedule with courses too difficult to handle, and I became extremely stressed out and anxious because of this. My boyfriend and I broke up because he was dealing with stress and he wanted to smoke marijuana to feel relief, and I couldn’t deal with that because I am too insecure with that drug because a lot of family has been taken away from me because of it. He is happy now, and that is all I have ever wanted for him. That’s all I have wanted for everyone else, except me. This year I broke down my perfection, and stripped myself nearly to the core, to find out why I have never felt the happiness people write about all the time, the happiness I see on my friends’ smiling faces each day, the happiness everyone has wanted for me. I know it’s around me, but I’ve never been able to feel it. Maybe it is my brain, my past, and my critical thoughts that deprive me of this euphoria, but what I am certain of is that I have little time left if I continue to feel this way. This year I have lost; including my best friend by his own hand, my sense of desire and motivation, many friendships, my academic reputation, control, and the one true man who has ever made a difference in my life, and brought me a thread of happiness for once in my entire life. But this year I have gained too, from these despairs. I know there is someone in me who wants to live this life, and not leave the world by a bottle of pills, or a gun, or drowning myself in my bathtub. I know there’s a sense of desperate grasp on this life to not let go, the same sense that forced my legs down the stairs that night- the same sense that has been in a war with my mind for 16 years. It has been a fight everyday in my life, and it will always be a fight- this I’ve come to accept. I will never wake up in the morning and not be sad I woke up, and I will never be able sit in a bathtub and not have the desire to let the faucet keep running. Those thoughts will never leave, but what I can help are the things I surround myself with. I am transferring schools junior year to go back to public school, because the school I attend now I have never felt enough; to fit the standards, or to be perfect enough. I am trying to find a fresh start, to maybe find some of the common happiness people always feel. Maybe I will never find it, and that voice in my head will take my life one day, or maybe I can keep this fight going for as long as I naturally live. It’s the people who surround me and love me that keep me here, but I need to find a reason for myself to stay. This year has broken me down completely to the core, and this year has brought a stronger fight in me than I’ve ever felt.