As I laid in my bed wrestling my anxiety about my week I thought to myself I really need to go see Anne. Anne is my counselor, but I like to think of her more as one of my dear friends. She does know my deepest secrets after all. At first glance I’m sure you would never guess that I’ve been going to a counselor on and off since my junior year of high school. I bet you wouldn’t guess a lot of things about me.

That’s the problem with judging someone at first glance you can only see what’s on the surface. Depression doesn’t discriminate though, it doesn’t prey on a certain kind of person, but more often than not it can find a dark space inside you and make itself at home. I’ve tried to evict this unwanted friend of mine many times. Sometimes I think that dark space is finally vacant but just as breathing gets easier he likes to remind me he’s a “lifelong friend,” or so he thinks.

There are so many things I wish people could understand about struggling with depression. Sometimes it is the intensity of your feelings being too much to bare. The hardest part though is the numbness, the lack of feeling that reminds you that you are alive.

Depression doesn’t wear a hooded sweatshirt and look like it's never seen the sun. It looks like a sorority girl tailgating with her best friends, it looks like a football player who lost his love for the game. Take a step back and look in the mirror because depression my friend looks a lot like you and me.

I think this is how it takes such captive of people’s lives, because it isn’t always in your face, sometimes the proof is in the bleeding words of your best friend’s journal or in their silence that they hope echoes loud enough for someone to finally hear. Others think that people that suffer from depression don’t laugh or play or smile, but it’s not that black and white. Depression is simply gray, there are days of sunshine, days of severe storms and the rest of the days fall somewhere in between.

Here is what you do, you cry and you cry and you cry, but one day you will get tired of crying. You will develop such a hatred for this hollow feeling you have inside. This is your fire, your fuel, your inspiration to pick yourself up and fight back. I know that it will feel like someone is grabbing onto you and trying to pull you back down, but you have to find something stronger to immerse yourself in. It isn’t easy or pretty and the tidal wave of emotion will more than likely knock you down more times than you would like. This isn’t your cue to accept defeat, it is your cue to search deep inside yourself to find the things that are nourishing to your heart and help you see the ugly lies that depression made you believe. Because they are lies. You are not empty. You are not unlovable. You are not unworthy. You are not depression, no matter how desperately it tries to convince you, you are.