One of the more striking things about having a mental illness is that it is invisible. Sometimes I’ll go weeks without my usual symptoms, sometimes I’ll go days, but in those extended periods I’ll sometimes doubt that I even have depression and its unfortunate partner anxiety. I have had so many people tell me I am exaggerating, that at those still and quiet moments I start to think that I really am pulling something out of nothing, craving attention or trying to make myself the center of attention. Sometimes it makes me think I am a damsel in distress, calling out into the darkness for a prince or princess to rescue me—but that’s not the truth: I want to save myself, I want to pick up my own pieces and put them back together myself. Every time someone insists I’m making myself up, putting myself into a community I don’t belong in, I regress back to square one, invalidating months’ work of healing. It also forces me to ask the question: why is no one taking me seriously?

People always tell me that “I don’t have to go through this alone”, but it feels like it every day when they ask me to just get over it. It takes me months to make a counseling appointment with the only people that accept my insurance, and even then, it feels like I’m walking in circles. I feel no real growth on my part, just that I’m recounting a story over and over for new ears each time. Of course, I understand that it is a two-way street: if I want to get help I must be willing to receive it, but each time it feels like I’m speaking to a wall who only nods and asks me how I’m feeling. It is important to dissect my emotions, they are an unfortunate guiding factor in almost everything we do as humans, but as I’m sitting there I feel like they’re asking the same questions over and over again, and there’s only so many times I can answer it. But of course, I have to be nice as possible, so I just answer—again. And while this happens I have made the unconscious choice in my head that this person is not someone to be confided in.

I feel myself doing it all the time, writing people off in my mind as they speak to me, not as people I don’t like, but people I feel I can no longer confide in. It’s alienating because I do it every day, with ever connection I have, in a split-second I have decided if I can let them in to help me heal. Because each time the answer is no, I have successfully taken a hand over my world and drawn in metaphorical boundaries to split my land off the continent to form my own lonely island. Successfully isolating myself, my only choice is to go forward with my healing alone, which I have noticed is next to impossible, I always end up standing still, making the same mistakes and same hurtful decisions.

So what is my mental illness?

My mental illness is the sea that separates my island to the rest of the world, my mental illness is my biggest adversary, and my mental illness is the concrete that keeps me stuck in the same terrible decisions. It is not the wall “to get over”, and it is not the headache to “sleep off”, it is the desert I must cross, and the sea I must face. Biggest of all, it is not the obstacle I should have to face to become a better person. In the end, it is the skin I wear that if I ever fight through, will be discarded and forgotten.