Growing up, anxiety wasn't an issue for me. I had no problems making friends, talking to people I didn't know or talking in front of a large group of people. I was in drama club in middle school and had a lot of speaking roles - thinking back now, I was never afraid of getting in front of people.

Like everything else in this world, people change. In high school, I started to struggle with public speaking. I remember giving oral presentations and clumsily stuttering my way through my notes. I would shake uncontrollably when I had a solo in band, and I had a tough time making friends. I think it was around this time in my life where my mental illness issues had started to appear. Though they weren't severe by any means, I still found trouble where I hadn't had problems before. Why was I suddenly so clumsy when speaking in front of people? Why couldn't I make friends anymore?

My sister had started to struggle with mental illness at a much earlier age than me. She was depressed during high school, depressed going into college and I think she still struggles from time to time. I'm so proud of her for making it so far - maybe more proud of her than I am myself.

I never understood what was wrong with her until I was a couple years into college. It started out really mild - I was always tired, and I didn't know why. No matter how many hours I slept, I just felt exhausted. This was an exhaustion I had never felt before. It was looming over me every day, all day. I went to doctors and got blood tests, thinking that I had finally developed a thyroid disorder that ran in my family, but there was never anything wrong.

The sadness didn't come until later, but it crept into my life slowly - so slowly that I had hardly even noticed it. I lost the motivation to do almost anything. I was slacking at work, school and my social life. I blamed it on the exhaustion, thinking that nothing was wrong, and I went on with my life thinking that way.

Then came the sadness. It was mild at first, but soon, I couldn't stop thinking about how I was wasting my life. What was my purpose? Where did I belong? Did I even have purpose, or was I just here, being mediocre at best? Soon, I started thinking about how I didn't want to be here. I don't know where "here" was, but I repeated it in my head every minute of every day. This was when I decided that I needed to talk to someone.

I sought out a therapist, and we made some progress together. I started journaling, and I stopped the negative self-talk after testing out a few different tactics. Things started to finally look up, but it was short lived. I suddenly plunged down further than I had ever been before. I don't know what caused it, and I don't know why it hit me so hard. It's honestly nothing I had ever felt before.

I was down for a long, long time. I thought about a lot of dark things that I hadn't thought about before. I didn't want to exist, and I didn't want to talk to anyone about it. I isolated myself because I hated myself. It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to me. My therapist suggested that I speak to a doctor about medication, and that terrified me.

I was on medication briefly in the beginning of college. I didn't like what it did to me. I felt like a literal zombie - I felt nothing. I stopped it myself, which was probably a bad idea, but hey, I would have rather felt anxious than nothing.

I asked my mom what I should do, and she told me that my father had struggled with depression for years before he passed. I had no idea.

I decided to try medication for the first time in years. Now, after being on it for eight months, I can honestly say that I am in a truly better place than I was. Taking medication doesn't mean I was weak, and it didn't give me some false sense of happiness. Instead, it allowed me to finally feel like myself. My grades are up, I have a sense of purpose and I feel like my days are sunny instead of stormy. I spent a long time in the dark, but I know the dark days made me wiser in the end.

I got a tattoo recently that symbolized my win over my mental illness. It's a semicolon. It means that as an author, I have the power to end my sentence, but instead, I used a semicolon to keep it going. It's a metaphor for my life and the choice I made to keep it going.

If you're struggling with your own mental health, please, get help. It was the best thing I had ever done for myself. I'm the person I know I'm supposed to be now, and I often get told by my loved ones that I'm so strong for making it out of depression. Honestly, I don't feel strong. I feel like this is a constant battle that may or may not go away. I feel like I waited too long. I feel like can never take back the days (and grades) I lost, but I'm happy to be where I'm at now.

If there was any advice I could give to you, I would say this: know that you are loved, and know that there are better days ahead for you.