It’s a 10 letter word that starts in your mind and has the potential to metastasize to the point where your whole body starts to believe, blindly following and giving in to something that may not even have reasons. Once those 10 letters spread, it feels like an insurmountable weight has been placed on you. You try to lessen the pain that’s crushing you by wishing it away, or by even confiding in other people. Sometimes that works, but more often than not, it somehow adds to the weight. With every ounce gained, you feel like the letters are becoming so heavy that they’re a part of you that can never go away. Then the longer they’re there, they develop their own letters, which develop into sentences, paragraphs, books, and so on, and of nothing but everything you aren’t supposed to feel. You read it all hoping that you could acknowledge, accept, and move on, but instead you dwell.

At that point it becomes more than a word, it becomes depression. Depression is something no one likes to talk about because of the negative connotation that comes with it, but when you’re dealing with it, those terrible things become more than something you don’t want to talk about. It becomes something you deny, but embody at the same time. It becomes something you want to fix, but are scared of the affects that come with the medication to fix it. It becomes everything. At that point, you don’t know where to turn to except to your room, to your bed, where you can fold into yourself, pull the blanket over your body, and sleep to temporarily forget about the sadness you feel. You wake up hoping it was just a nightmare, only to realize that this kind of nightmare doesn’t go away just by waking up. You live in it every day. Then, you will yourself to get out of bed, trying your best to ignore the mental and physical pain you feel, put on a mask in front of others so you can avoid the confrontation and judgement you would get if you didn’t. Slowly over the course of the day, the mask disintegrates, revealing how you truly feel. You pick up the remains and hold them over you, scared to let the pieces fall. You tell yourself to hold it together for just a few more hours until you get home, and you do. Once you get home, the cycle repeats itself. You go to bed, get up, fake a smile, go home, and go to bed. You know it can’t go on forever, you’re going to break sometimes and show others how you truly feel, only to tell them that it’s nothing and that you’re just tired. But, it’s more than just tired. It’s the feeling of wanting to cry, but not having the energy to. It’s the feeling of wanting to get out of the house and hang out with your friends, but being too afraid to go outside.

That’s when the anxiety sets in. Anxiety and depression go hand and hand. It is often that where one goes, the other follows soon after. While depression is feeling drained, anxiety is caring too much about everything. It is worrying about things that you can’t control or even things that haven’t happened yet. It’s your heart racing when you think about going out later, about the people you might run into, about the things that could happen to you. It’s a feeling of impending doom when nothing is in sight. With anxiety and depression together, you don’t know what to do. Your mind is conflicted. You just wish it could all go away. But to others, depression and anxiety are just other words that are in the dictionary. I just wish those people could realize that they’re more than words. They’re feelings that no one should have to deal with.