My friend, Matthew, wrote an article a while ago about his pursuit of happiness. I recently endured the toughest year of my life but managed to come out as a stronger and better person at the end of everything. Looking back and reading his article have inspired me to reflect upon my own pursuit of happiness.

2016 was OK for me until April which is when everything began to go downhill. I found myself in legal trouble around the middle of the month and my parents threatened to disallow me from attending college, even though I had worked so hard my entire life in order to attend. In the same period of time, someone I once considered a close friend stabbed me in the back and ran off with my girlfriend. I was left with almost nobody on my side, an uncertain future, and no effective way of coping with any of this.

I had never seen my parents so angry and there was no way that I could talk to them about how I was feeling. On top of everything, I wasn’t out to anyone from my school, so I couldn’t tell them that I was so devastated because of a breakup as well.

I suffered in silence with my only solace being my Internet friends and, yes, Internet friendships are valid – there is no arguing this. However, sometimes you need emotional support from people you see in person and sometimes you need a physical shoulder to cry on and someone to hand you tissues.

I cycled through the stages of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance) but certainly not in order; I spent most of my time in depression, some of it in anger, and occasionally acceptance once in a blue moon. I was grieving not only my lost relationship but also the loss of my friendships, my trust, and my happiness. For a while in August, right before I moved away to college, I thought that I was truly better. I thought that my grief had ceased and that it was only uphill from there.

Sadly, moving to college only reopened the old wounds. When I was home, I spent time with friends and had distractions. Moving hundreds of miles away from Michigan to Florida into a single room left me feeling isolated and lonely. I felt like my fellow freshmen already knew people from high school. Adding this to the fact that I began to ruminate about every painful thing I had experienced earlier in the year was not a pretty combination.

I ruminated worse than I ever did at home. I actually faced my sadness instead of running away from it – perhaps this was a vital step in my long-term healing process, but, in the moment, it just led me even further into the darkest spot of my life.

I like to joke that my sudden interest in The 1975’s music was a sign that I was getting a lot worse emotionally. All joking aside, it’s true. I literally laid in the dark on my bed, blasted “Me” (specifically the lyrics that went “I was thinking about killing myself, don’t you mind?”), and did nothing but think about how sad I was. It wasn’t healthy.

In all of this, I became spiteful. I became cynical. I looked around at my university and began to hate it. I rejected the potential of any friendships forming. My only source of human contact was through Tinder, but that was far from meaningful. I didn’t even want to give my school a chance and, within two weeks of moving in, I was already researching schools to which I could possibly transfer.

On Twitter, I kept a rant account, a private account where I was able to voice all of my innermost emotions to a small audience of close friends that I trusted. It acted as a journal of sorts, and, today as I read the old tweets from August, September, and October where I was at the lowest points emotionally, I couldn’t even recognize myself.

My sadness consumed me. It frightens me to look back and read all of the tweets I composed late at night about wanting to die. I wrote about hating my school so much without even giving it a chance. I wrote that I didn’t think I would even make it to 2017 because I just wanted to end everything. These thoughts scare me, but they also show me how much I’ve improved.

The shift happened at the end of October. I can’t say what triggered my drastic shift in attitude for sure, but this happened to be when I reconnected with someone who I believed to have hated me. Coincidentally, I also began to realize that I did have friends, I was smart, and, when I left for Thanksgiving break, I realized that I was beginning to consider my university as my home.

When I was reading my old rant tweets, one thing stuck out to me the most. I wrote that I deserved everything that happened to me. I deserved to lose everything. I deserved bad grades, and, most of all, I deserved to be miserable.

The sad thing is, I truly believed it. I truly believed that I was such an awful person that I deserved every terrible thing that life decided to throw at me that year. Now, I know that this wasn’t the case.

Life is just unfair. I didn’t deserve the legal issues – I was just trying to help a friend and it backfired. I didn’t deserve for my “friend” to backstab me and steal the person who mattered most to me. I didn’t deserve for the sadness to creep up on me and consume me. I didn’t deserve any of that.

When you’re in such an unhealthy state of mind, however, it’s easy to believe that you do deserve it.

Looking forward, if I ever feel myself getting bad again, there are a couple of things I will remind myself. First, the most important thing is what I just said; like Katrina from the “Animal Crossing” video game preaches, “Bad times are just times that are bad.” Secondly, I need to make sure that I don’t ruminate so much on my troubles. Lying in bed and blasting songs from my sad playlist was not healthy in the slightest.

I still get sad sometimes. I still doubt my academic abilities despite the fact that I got all A’s last semester. I still find it hard to look at myself in the mirror when I know that I’m not ugly and that physical worth is superficial and ultimately invaluable. But, because I’m in a much healthier place, I don’t let the sadness consume me like it once did. I count my blessings and I know that everything is OK.

If I killed myself when I wanted to in April, I would have never been able to deliver the graduation speech that made the front page of my town’s newspaper.

If I killed myself when I wanted to in June, I would have never been able to see the US Women’s National Soccer Team in the front row.

If I killed myself when I wanted to in July, I would have never been able to go to Chicago and Lollapalooza with my best friends.

If I killed myself in August, I would have never been able to meet Hayley Kiyoko twice for free and see Fifth Harmony live again.

If I killed myself when I wanted to in September, the answers to the questions that kept me up at night would have never found me.

If I killed myself when I wanted to in October, I would have never been able to watch everything fix itself. I would have never been able to realize how special the friendships that I had formed in my classes actually were. I would have never been able to watch myself get a perfect score on my Chemistry exam and pull off all A’s.

If I killed myself, I would have never been able to achieve the happiness I feel today.

My pursuit of happiness was a long battle. One that I didn't think I would come out of alive for a while. I still have a way to go, but I'm grateful to not be in such a dark place.

To anyone else going through a hard time, as Ingrid Michaelson sings, “All we can do is keep breathing.” And sometimes, that’s really all you can do when you’re as sad as I was. But as long as you keep breathing, you’ll be able to get through anything. I promise.