#genuinely same

“Let me know if you need any more assistance, I am currently doing absolutely nothing but procrastinating for the rest of my day.”

Four simple words - I suffer from depression. And for a long time, I think I was living two totally different lives, where one person was always afraid of the other. I was afraid that people would see me for who I really was... That beneath my smile there was struggle, and beneath my light there was dark, and beneath my big personality just hid even bigger pain... For me, for a large part of my life, I feared myself. I feared my truth, I feared my honesty, I feared my vulnerability. And that fear made me feel like I was forced into a corner. I was forced into a corner and there was only one way out. And so I thought about that way every single day... That's the sickness. That's the struggle, that's depression. Depression isn't chicken pox, you don't beat it once and it's gone forever. It's something you live with... And the scariest part is that after a while, you become numb to it. It becomes normal for you, and what you really fear the most isn't the suffering inside of you, it's the stigma inside of others. It's the shame, it's the embarrassment, it's the disapproving look on a friend's face. It's the whispers in the hallway that you're weak, it's the comments that you're crazy. That's what keeps you from getting help. That's what makes you hold it in and hide it. It's the stigma. So you hold it in and you hide it and even though it's keeping you in bed everyday and it's making your life feel empty no matter how much you try and fill it, you hide it because the stigma in our society around depression is very real.