This past week "Thirteen Reasons Why" came out on Netflix. I read the book so long ago I didn't really remember all that happened, but I remember how it made me feel, and the show gave me that same feeling - that feeling of what I felt like in high school.
Like every socially awkward high schooler, I hated high school. I hated being in the building, I hated being around those kids, and most of all I hated who I was forced to become. You see, high school was the worst four years of my life. In fact, the three years in middle school were pretty shitty too, but I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about high school and the side effects it can cause to a person.
During those four awful, hellish years I was an angsty teen with depression and anxiety ... and to add more to my problems I had no friends. I had no friends because the ones I had earlier had left me, and I never learned to trust people with myself. If you think I never thought about suicide in high school, then you are deeply mistaken. It wasn't until now, my freshman year in college, did I figure out why I thought about it. It was because I was in a bad place, that place being high school. That is just one side effect of going to high school.
I also had panic attacks just about every day. And let me tell you a little something about panic attacks, they f****** suck. My panic attacks would usually happen in class or at lunch. It used to get so bad that I stopped eating lunch, and my stomach would have these sharp shooting pains. In class, I could barely pay attention because of all the blood rushing through my ears and my body feeling like it was under some kind of hostile takeover. The panic attacks did not come from high school, they came from a very dark time in middle school. But I guess they wanted to stick around and go to high school with me. They didn't get better or worse in high school, they were just different. But it was still a side effect of high school.
A fun little thing that I developed in high school besides boobs was depression. My therapist explained that since I went through so much of my life without trying to get help for my anxiety, I started to lose hope, and out of that hopelessness, depression was born. Depression isn't feeling sad and crying all the time, no I could easily differentiate the two. Depression is feeling nothing at all. You don't cry, you don't laugh, you don't feel anything. I got it my freshman year when I was at the end of my rope. So yeah, it was a side effect of being in high school, and I was declared depression free this past summer before heading into college.
High school isn't fun for a lot of people, and being a former high schooler myself, I can most definitely vouch for that. So if this was hard for you to read, imagine having to live this, and so many kids do. They aren't saying anything because adults don't pay attention or really see the world through their eyes.
