One of my earliest confrontations with mental health struggles was at twelve years old, when my cousin committed suicide at sixteen. My mom told me a few days later, driving me home from dance class. Soon after my shock and grief came confusion. Though I never asked aloud, I kept wondering “Why?” He’d left no final letter, no tidy explanation like the ones in movies, nothing to make the family feel better. Now, years later, a shadow hangs over my aunt on her son’s birthday and every holiday season. Many mornings, she struggles to get out of bed. Despite understanding the serious nature of my cousin’s depression, I am ashamed to admit that my confusion with his death manifested as frustration and irritation toward mental health issues. Undoubtedly, my black community influenced this, where therapy was mocked as a “white people thing.” Concepts like “attention-seeking” and helplessness seeped into my attitude toward depression and anxiety specifically, because rather than seeking to understand self-harm, for example, people around me questioned its validity, and I did too. Worse, these questions served not to find answers or assistance, but to blame and ostracize. I found myself upset with my cousin, who had left his mother to suffer in the aftermath of his death every year since. In college, however, I met my best friend, who struggles with severe anxiety and depression. Throughout my first year of college, I was the one she pulled aside when her anxious thoughts boiled to the surface as nervous tears or nervous anger. At its worst, her depression kept her in bed most hours of the day, rising only to go to class. Food was not even a priority. Both directly and indirectly, she was challenging my attitude and flawed misunderstanding. I have seen how her depression simply wells from beneath her feet, with or without reason. She has taught me that her brain works very differently from mine, and her mental illness is a daily battle. At the same time, much of my understanding also grew from realizing that her brain is not as different from mine as I had thought. My first year of college was the hardest year I have experienced yet. During the pandemic, my on-campus experience was isolating and unmotivating, each day pocked with uninspiring online classes. Like everyone during the pandemic, my life fell to the world’s uncontrollable nature, but most stressful for me, however, was my father’s recent unemployment. After he was released from his job in June of 2020, tension and unease blanketed the room each time I returned home as my parents struggled with the innate frustration that finances incur. I carried this with me on campus, where the energy already suffered from isolation policies. I reserved my energy for school assignments, but I ended most weekdays in my dim, single dorm room and spent many weekends drifting in and out of naps. I am fortunate to have never been diagnosed with depression or anxiety, but I suddenly found myself feeling and doing many of the things I had seen people with these illnesses do and feel. How could I be impatient with my friend’s reluctance to get out of bed when I was beginning to behave this way too? How could I be impatient with her escalating anxieties when I found myself anxious too—worried for my family, my health, and my education? My emotions were nowhere near the severity of diagnosed illnesses, but in recognizing a similar, albeit less severe, version of them, I am far better able to understand, validate, and support those around me who suffer from them. Furthermore, when you consider how often other parts of our bodies get sick, ache, or break, mental health issues are no longer an oddity. If something as simple as a leg can break, if our lungs cough sometimes, and if our wrists grow sore from overuse, then certainly something as complex as the brain, which dictates everything we do, think, believe, and communicate, can injure itself as well. Our bodies are not perfect, so we should not expect our brains to be. As sympathetic as we are to those with cancer or a broken leg, we should extend that understanding to the human mind as well. I am learning to be more aware of my words and more sensitive to how I affect others. Regardless of diagnoses, our emotions are far more fragile than we think. As a writer, it is my job to understand and illustrate the complex tides of human emotion. Growing more sensitive to mental health as not a shameful secret but a common struggle we all may face to some degree has made me a stronger, more effective writer. Like any good writer, I want to reach people and even change their thinking. My English and Creative Writing major contains no science, but words have the power to enact change in my community’s understanding of mental health. We can no longer alienate therapy or associate help with weakness. As a black woman, I believe that writing about black characters who struggle with these issues and speaking on my personal confrontations with mental health will illuminate these challenges as much more common and much less shameful. Although conversations about mental health can be difficult, I have seen through my relationship with my best friend that the connection that arises from them always engenders stronger bonds. If I can replicate this emotional well-being in my novels, through my characters and nonfiction essays, I know I can reach a large audience of people who are seeking to understand and destigmatize their emotions as well.