Submitted via a video link

Mental health has always been something I struggled with from a young age, but I never thought it would impact me most unexpectedly. I remember in middle school I started to notice my mental health was declining. My most relevant memory comes after I read a book series. My sixth-grade reading assignment was Percy Jackson, and I got hooked on the series as soon as I finished that first book. Once I read through all the author’s works, anything I could get my hands on, I finally finished and thought. For some reason, that sparked a dullness in me; realizing my life would never be fantastical, I would never be surrounded by friends ready to jump in and help me with whatever I was faced with. I can’t say for certain that that was what made me fall into a depression or just the hormones of puberty, but I stopped feeling excited, or even angry at things, just numb. Growing up with quick internet access also shaped my young mind. I was seeing depictions of depression and poor mental health being romanticized, and that made me try things I never would have thought without the help of the internet. I started to self-harm. To me, it was a way to release any strong emotions, anger, or sadness, sometimes even happiness. I felt so alone and that if I were to talk to someone, they would see me as an attention seeker. And maybe I was seeking attention, because I just wanted someone to see me and help me. I felt like I had no reason to be feeling the way I was. I had two loving parents, I had friends, and I had my sisters, whom I loved more than anything. I didn’t understand what was making me so numb. At the age of 12, I tried to kill myself the first time. I just took a handful of pills from the medicine cabinet and swallowed them one by one. I had no clue what I was doing or how many I should take, so when I woke up the next morning, I decided not to try again. Not too long after, a friend of my mother noticed the marks on my arm and called me out at a family dinner. When we got home, my mother demanded to see my arms, and when she did, she got angry with me and asked why I would do something so stupid. I ran out the door and as far as I could down the street, to a ditch where I fell asleep for a few hours. When I woke up, there were cops shining flashlights just above the ditch, calling my name. I figured I would walk home; I just wanted to go to bed. When I made my way through the door, I was greeted by a house full of people I barely knew, and cops trying to console my family. As the tensions fell, people left, and the cops began to question me. “Did anyone do anything to you? Why is it that you’re doing this to yourself? What is going on that made you act like this?” I had no answers, because there were none; nothing had ever happened that would trigger me to be like this; I just was. That made everything so much more frustrating. After this incident, I was put into therapy. I had an aversion to talking to therapists, so it wasn’t helping me in the way they wanted it to. I was so tired of being spectated and picked apart by someone who knew nothing about me, and I was feeling the pressure that this was taking money from my family. I begged not to go anymore, and from then on, I kept it to myself, trying to ignore the numbness inside me. Years later mental health came back to haunt me, but not me directly; it was my sister. My sister successfully committed suicide at the age of 15, only just starting her freshman year of high school. My family was blindsided by this. We failed to recognize the signs that she was struggling. I remember just days before, she asked for help putting together her Halloween costume, and now, on October 28th, she was dead. All the pain and confusion hit me as soon as the police told us they had found her body. All these years of struggling with my mental health, I never thought my sister would be gone before I was. She was older than me, but only by 18 months. Growing up, everyone thought we were twins, and sometimes it felt like we were. Before I could fully speak, she would “translate” what I was trying to say. We always shared a room, and we fought all the time, but at the end of every day, she was my best friend. She was the only person who understood me, the only person I felt like I could open up to. And now, I must figure out the rest of my life without her. Each day I feel her absence, but I vowed to keep living for her. I choose to push through my struggles because she wasn’t able to. While it hurts to be here without her, hitting every milestone missing a piece of myself, I will never give up because I carry the weight of her with me.