Dear mental illness,

You suck. When I say this I don’t mean that you suck as in you aren’t cool or are a bore, I mean that you suck as in you are sucking the life out of me. You are the reason that I find no joy in the things that I used to love. You ripped the beauty from sunrises and impregnated my thoughts with negativity. My mental illness crafted a stigma in my brain that because I am depressed, I am not good enough. I am single, which means that I am not good enough for relationships. I cannot look at myself in the mirror and see beauty, so I am not good enough.

Dear mental illness,

You hurt me. You hurt me in the sense that because of you, I can't speak as easily as I used to. I can't make friends with new people that I meet because I am terrified of letting them inside my head. You hurt me by causing my anxiety. You hurt me because you won't let me live my life without being consistently filled with worry and sadness.

Dear mental illness,

I can't be happy and it is your fault. There are fleeting moments where I think that I will be okay, but then I am placed right back into this never ending hell. I look at the people around me who are happy and it hurts me. It hurts that they can find joy in little things and themselves and I can't. I can look at things like flowers and sunsets and feeling nothing, but I can look at bridges and wonder if a fall from them would kill me.

Dear people who don't understand,

Mental illness messes up the beauty of being alive, and that it something that kills me. It kills me to look at children, so full of joy and innocence, and wonder if they are going to turn out just like me - hating the world and everything in it because they feel so separated from it. It hurts that I can't watch a sunrise or a sunset and think it is beautiful, I can only think that another day has passed where I don't want to be alive anymore. Mental illness is the reason that my friends won't let me go near bridges alone, the reason that they don't let me near knives, the reason that they choose their wording so carefully when speaking to me. It is the reason that my family walks on eggshells around me, careful to not set me off. Mental illness is the reason I spent time in a mental institute and came out feeling worse because I didn't get better. Mental illness is why I look in the mirror and hate my reflection.

Dear mental illness,

Thank you. You gave me an opportunity to connect to a different subgroup of people. You brought me my closest friends. You showed me who was there for me. You made me, me.