I've struggled with mental health issues for the majority of my life. As I was growing up, from the outside looking in, I probably seemed like a pretty happy kid to most people. I've always had a bubbly personality with a great passion and care for helping others. Loved ones and strangers alike. In my younger years, I did have my fair share of difficult experiences, to put it simply. My parents got divorced in 2014 and separated when I was 9. That was one of the messiest years of my life. The months leading up to their separation and the events that ensued were the start of my struggles. My dad struggled heavily with alcoholism and the last six months of my parent's marriage were essentially filled with my dad gaslighting me and constantly seeking validation from me, his 9-year-old son. A few months after my parent's divorce, I was sexually assaulted by my neighbor. She was 14 or 15 at the time and came over to our house often because all the kids on the block used to hang out a lot. At the time I was too young to understand how wrong what she was doing to me was, but it seriously affected my mental state. I think it was a big part of why I became distrustful and withdrawn. I went to a little bit of therapy following the divorce but it didn't make a significant impact on me. As I continued to grow up I dealt with social anxiety, trust issues, depression, and some other issues alike. There were ups and downs but the depression was always there even if it wasn't always noticeable. In 2020, following the start of the pandemic and the lockdown, my depression became unbearable. The isolation from my friends and feeling so alone made my depression start to become unbearable. That was the time when I started smoking THC carts to try to make myself feel somewhat okay. When that didn't help I started cutting; sometimes as a way of taking out my feelings, sometimes because I couldn't feel anything, to begin with. Smoking and cutting became a cycle and I stopped keeping up with my grades In 2022, earlier this year during my first semester, a girl I had recently broken up with accused me of sexual assault and spread it around the school everyone hated me and I was getting told to kill myself just walking down the hall. The accusation was false and I was able to prove that by releasing a video of her admitting she lied to ruin my reputation while she didn't know she was being recorded. People slowly started believing me but things became too much and at my absolute lowest point, I attempted to jump off a bridge and was stopped by my girlfriend who called me at the right time. I spent the next week at an inpatient facility for safety and followed that with 2 months of outpatient therapy for 6 hours a day. That treatment completely changed my life and I'm forever grateful for my support team who helped me. At first, we worked on my self-harm tendencies and I haven't hurt myself since the second week I was there. They diagnosed me with MDD, GAD, and ADHD and got me on medications which greatly helped. The ways in which they were able to make such an impact on me are what made me want to pursue social work. I want to work with teens struggling with mental health and provide the help that changed my life.