Mental health is one of those taboo topics that are hard to talk about.

Everyone thinks they know what is best, but that is just not the case sometimes.

There are so many different mental illnesses and each person approaches their mental illness differently. I have struggled with depression since I was a freshman in high school and it doesn’t get easier as I get older. Mental illness is something you have to live with your entire life.

When I realized I had depression, I was confused.

Myself and others had been self-harming all year with no reasoning behind the feelings we felt. We didn’t know what depression was and why it was a factor in our self-harming behaviors. Some people thought we were cutting for fun, because it was the “cool” thing to do. It wasn’t. It alleviated the pain we felt inside for a small amount of time before we felt the same pain come back.

The emotions we kept buried, the secrets we kept inside, were the reason we turned to self-harm. I began to think there was something wrong with me, no one thought I was doing this because there was an underlying issue. My mom brushed it off, some of my friends scolded me, but no one had answers. I was suffering, and there were so many people watching as I suffered. I didn’t understand why no one would help me.

That was six years ago and I got the answers three years ago.

I had depression and needed to see a therapist or counselor to figure out why I felt the way I did. I tried to get an appointment, but no one called me back. I began to feel like my illness was nothing more than a joke to the doctors. I took my depression into my own hands and began college with nothing more than good feelings. I was convinced I could “cure” myself by not being sad or letting the voices in my head become real. I made new friends and hung out with a different crowd while I was in college. I thought my depression had finally went away, but it hadn’t.

I continued to feel worthless and depressed, hiding my feelings from the girls I lived with and my boyfriend.

I realized that nothing was going to heal me. I had finally accepted that my depression is a lifelong illness that I’ll always have. That was two years ago. Today, I still feel depressed, just not as often. I haven’t self-harmed in over a year, my biggest accomplishment yet. I think that we try to cure our mental illness because then we feel like we have control of this thing that took over our body and mind. There is no cure, we have to learn how to live with it without doing harm to ourselves and others.

I use my writing to combat my depression.

I write because it makes me feel like I’m making a difference in the world, even on my bad days. Depression came into my life six years ago but I am not letting it control me anymore. I am stronger than my depression.

My depression does not define me, it refines who I have become.