A brief history of my mental health. Warning: very long.

I began my slide into depression the summer after my sophomore year of high school. Obviously, I didn't know it was happening, but looking back, it's really easy to see how I got where I was, and where I was is a dark place. I don't care if nobody reads this, but I just want to write it. Perhaps it can help someone see when it is time to stop, take a step back, and get help. I only did because people made me.

Summer of '09, I took a job working at Safeway, a grocery store. I was a courtesy clerk. The job was hard but not impossible. Since I actually worked hard, I was quickly working a full 40 every week. Then my mom came home in June: she had cancer. Some kind of tumor in her thigh. Not clear on what it was even now. Then my best friend texted me that same month. He's fucking moving. To Iowa. And he's doing it in like 3 weeks. I'd always depended on Lucas for everything; when I fought with my parents, I rode to his house. The whole summer was a kick in the gut- boom, Mom gone to do chemo for another week. Boom- Lucas gone for good. I buried myself in the work. For an upper-middle class 16 year old, working alongside blue collar service industry people was enlightening, to say the least. I toughened up to fit in, and checked myself so I wouldn't seem like a stuck up prick.

Junior year began, and I was slammed with homework. I was taking an AP class, calculus, and physics. I was trying to fit in NHS volunteering with work and my student council position... from a college perspective it now seems not as bad. Even at the time I was managing well, pulling in A except in calc.

Early fall: My other lifelong best friend from high school, Schyler, is diagnosed with leukemia. Nobody deserved it less. Schyler was a big goofy guy who'd never hurt a person in his life. Now he's staring down ALL. Chance of survival at five years: 75%. Sounds good, but I remember reading online and thinking: what the fuck about after five years? To make things worse, Schyler and I had grown apart over the last few years. I was being killed by guilt about being a bad friend. Schyler is pulled from school to protect his immune system.

October: With Lucas and Schyler gone, I have basically no close friends. I fall back to hanging out with a group of kids, mostly older than me, that I've known by proxy through “Dan”. They're all highly religious, going to youth group, blah blah blah. They're boring, but they're all reasonably intelligent, friendly, and at least it's someone to hang out with. One of my friends, Cristy, had a dad, Bryan, who was fairly influential. He was sharp, I'd talk public policy with him sometimes. I liked him and trusted him, he was even someone I thought of as a role model of sorts.

On Halloween, he is arrested and cited for furnishing alcohol to a minor. He was found giving peppermint schnapps to “Jane” one of Cristy's best friends, and someone who we hung out with often. In a car. With only the two of them. Miles out of town. That was the end of being around Cristy's house for me. But what did Dan and company do? Deny everything. “I'm sure there's a good explanation.” “No, there fucking isn't.” This man who was supposedly a role model and leader, these kids who were supposedly nice, intelligent, Christian kids, we all fucking hypocrites. I stopped hanging out with them; they disgusted me with how fake they were. Back to square zero with friends.

Meanwhile, student government position is deteriorating. “Leadership” was a do-nothing class, so as a junior I mostly did nothing. Naturally, the seniors did nothing either. However, Ms Warner got tired of nothing being done, so she began to hassle everyone except the seniors. I was required to justify myself while the jerk off jocks in the class took attendance then went to McDonalds? Why? Her daughter was a senior. Her daughter was ASB secretary or some bullshit, not president. When she tried to tell me what to do I had one of the biggest blow ups I have ever had with a teacher. She agreed to give me an A if I agreed to drop the class. Easy choice, the all important GPA: saved.

Things don't get better in the spring, I hit more walls with teachers and have more meltdowns. I get ejected from my first period TA position after using the time to hack into another teacher's computer and change his attendance records. I lied to the teacher I TA'd for, a stupid thing to do. A friend of mine sets up a new extension of Rotary, but her asshole accountant dad is doing the advising. I spend months organizing a project, trying to put together a program tutoring little kids and raising money for Schyler's leukemia treatment by holding a Guitar Hero Tournament. The anal SOB wants people to sign fucking liability releases to play Xbox. I walked out of that club, I couldn't sit through another bullshit meeting.

Now the calculus grade is falling. The community college had changed professors at the semester, and the new guy is an idiot. I'm not getting integration. My hometown is tiny; there is literally nobody within 100 miles qualified to teach it to me. I start going to tutoring sessions, then asking every math teacher I know for help, finally, I cheat with Wolfram Alpha on the final. I manage a B.

The SATs are starting up now, so I gear up and take those. While I'm taking them, my friend catches a girl staring at me weirdly from across the room. We'd spent all day the day before making out, she's essentially my girlfriend. After the SAT we go to her house a block away and make out for hours. She's like me, except the opposite. She's ultraconservative and super-Christian. She's high strung and damaged by her fucked up family. She's also smart. The relationship makes no sense and is crazy. After a month of not getting past fingering her, she leaves me because I don't share her “values”. At some point I had started caring about her, now I am hurt. I can't admit it though, so I hate her instead. We spend the next year trying to hurt each other even more.

My mental health is seriously damaged by all this, but for some reason you never feel like you're being damaged. I was angry and stressed all the time. I was rude to people. Most of the conflicts I've described ended with me blatantly insulting someone in person or in writing.

Now it's college application time. I'm applying to Ivy League schools and I think I have a shot at getting in. So the stress is incredible. I'm applying to 8 schools. God knows how many scholarships. And though I don't realize it, I'm being destroyed. More SATs, more SAT II's, more AP tests. Have to get this transcript from here and do this FASFA shit. Whatever. I'm doing it alone because my parents are great people, but have no idea what to do. I also don't trust them to not fuck up something critical.

The stress is too much. By the end of first semester shit is hitting the fan. My grade in AP Chem, my only hard class, is sinking like a stone. The teacher is pissed because I'm late every day. I'm not sleeping. I'm picking fights with the teacher and administration for no reason. I skip Spanish for a week and a half. When the principal hunts me down and asks why, I tell him point blank the teacher is an imbecile, the class is a joke, and I have a 98. I refused to take a state test. Every interaction with my parents is a fight. I'm convinced that no college wants me, no girl wants me. I take up with some guys at school who are assholes and start being a full time asshole to everyone. I remember seriously considering suicide as an option. Why? I don't know. I remember writing my own obituary in my head.

I'd been seeing a counselor a few times over the past year. Finally, she and my parents tell me during a session in January: what about medication. I don't need any medication, I think, I'm not depressed. I don't know. At this point I remember kind of going numb. The realization that I had a serious problem was... unreal. I was prescribed lamotrigene aka lamictal, a mood stabilizer. I dropped Spanish from my class schedule and re-arranged things so I had more independence and free time. I got a summer job that was for the Forest Service cutting down trees. 11$/hr. Outside, in the summer air, in the National Forest. I didn't get in to any Ivy League schools. I didn't get valedictorian. A few months before, these things would have destroyed me. Now I was fine.

I've been in college for a semester now at a small liberal arts school a long way from home. This winter break, I texted my ex. We're not enemies anymore. I met a great girl in school, she's not a girlfriend at this point, but she's incredible and things seem headed in that direction. I love the school and the city it is in. I have this new thing: confidence. Even if I feel insecure, I fake confidence every single time. That's why the girl likes me. That's why my roommate like me. That's why the upperclassmen even like me. That's why I'm on the Mock Trial A-team and two other clubs are trying to get me to take a leadership position. 3.82 GPA: not bad.

TLDR: I didn't realize I had a problem until someone slapped it in my face. You may not know how depressed you actually are; medication CAN help. Finally: Things do get better. And last: confidence. Fake it till you make it. Nobody will respect you if you don't at least appear to respect yourself. So shower, put on some decent clothes every day, and act like a winner, even if you don't think you are.