I have always struggled with mental health issues, while my home situation helped keep it from showing too prominently until middle school. I know it’s always been there. I am a student who struggles with severe anxiety and depression and did not find out about this until around middle school. Growing up I was always the child that seemed happy and go-lucky around others. The nights struggling to understand why my parents split up and getting unnecessarily upset thinking it was my fault were what wasn’t seen. Around middle school, right after covid ended, I began to realize I felt more hopeless and anxious. I ignored it for a while, hoping it was just the change from elementary to middle school. The more I ignored it however, It began to worsen. My mom took me for a regular check-up at one point and I happened to mention this. After evaluation, my doctors determined I had severe Anxiety and Depression, and that scared me. From that point forward, medicine became a priority for my mom, I needed to be fixed it seemed like. I tried medicine after medicine, I told her it didn’t work? We’d up the dose or change the medication entirely. As I navigated middle school, I joined my middle school band to try and help and meet someone. I got into a relationship at this time which turned out to be worse for my mental health than anything else. I couldn’t get therapy, my mom told me I didn’t need it. I was a chronically online child who had no outlets for how I felt. Nights crying in my room, missing a ton of school, grades dropping simply because I didn’t care anymore. I wasn’t myself. It was no real help that my mother married a narcissist and everything I did was treading on eggshells. I stopped eating as much in fear he would make any sort of comment when I left my room. Me and my middle school boyfriend broke up halfway through 8th grade, things finally did start to look a little better. While I still struggled, I kept to things like band and tried to make friends. As high school rolled around, I began to find things that helped me. Music, art, writing, you name it. If it was creative, it helped. Whenever I was feeling depressive, anxious, or hopeless I resorted to one of these things. Even sometimes watching videos of my favorite youtubers helped. The real turning point for my mental health though was moving in with my dad and out of my moms home, this happened a few months ago and I don’t think I've ever felt happier. While I still have some of those hard nights and still struggle I can really notice a change in how I am mentally. While I'm still navigating, I do have the process of getting therapy in the works and the future doesn’t seem as impossible as it did to me in middle school. I’ve gone through it but now I'm eating better and unlearning the habits I developed during some of the darkest moments of my depression.

My grandpa is my best friend. Growing up in my grandparents house, whether he was in the garage working, or going to the veteran camping grounds, I was always at his hip. My grandpa, (Or as I call him, my “Papaw”), Was a marine vet in Desert Storm. I grew up with him at every veterans day convocation at school. Those were some of my best memories, down on that gym floor instead of in the bleachers right beside my best friend. My grandparents raised me for the most part, my mom being young and not willing to really commit to taking care of me, and my dad working to try and make a living for me and him. Most of my time was spent with my grandparents, but mainly my papaw. If he was in the garage building or working on something, I was playing with saw dust a few feet away from him and claiming it was pixie dust. If he was outside working on the yard, I was making mud pies and finding shiny rocks in our driveway. Where he went, I went. When I was old enough, he let me drive his golf cart around the veteran camping grounds he helped out at. He was the person to teach me how to even drive a golf cart. It was the one thing I carried even into driving, at least the fundamentals anyway. When the first Despicable Me came out, me and him watched it together and adored it. The Despicable Me franchise became our “thing”. We wouldn't watch those movies with anyone else. I remember one day, I was probably 8 or 9 when this happened, the song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams came on the TV. I was engrossed in something else when my papaw grabbed my hand and pulled me off the chair, and we danced to the song. That memory might be my favorite with him. Being raised by my grandparents came with more than just movies and the outdoors, I learned how to bake with my papaw. We often stood and made cakes and other sweets, me pulling a chair from the table to the counter so I could see and help mix. Then, we’d turn on a movie while we waited for whatever we were making to bake. A lot of the time I might have even convinced him to turn on Spongebob which was my favorite show. Another thing we did that wasn’t movies and being out in the yard or garage was yearly we would take a trip to Washington DC for the memorial day parade which my papaw was in usually. I really cannot thank my papaw enough for anything that he’s taught me or done with me. I love him with all my heart, and I know he’s proud of me. We’ve made a lot of memories and I’m glad to have him as my papaw and I hope I'll have time to visit him sometime soon.