If you ask my friends one word to describe me, more than half would probably use the word “fragile” or an equal synonym as an answer. It’s true, I’m sometimes kind of a mess. I cry every time I watch Dumbo or I think about my mom’s hugs when I’m away at school. I get upset when I see something bad happening to someone I care about. I worry too much about what others think of me. Yet, I’m not so sure if all of these truly make me a fragile person.

In argument, I would counter that these make me the opposite of fragile. I would suggest that I am actually one of the strongest people I can be.

I didn’t grow up in a lot of poverty and struggle and I had a very happy childhood, yet I seemed to have turned out a bit different than a lot of other people I have met. Instead of being able to feel things in a regular amount, mine are always overexaggerated. I seem to experience life at a heightened frequency. It’s why I have anxiety and depression issues and it’s why I find it harder to make friends or have romantic relationships.

But I am not falling apart. Even though I feel things more than other people do, I have been able to get up and brush myself off each and every time and that has taken more courage than ever before.

Life doesn’t come naturally to people like me. We tend to either shut the world out, or become sucked up in its fear, but we do have the choice to do neither of those. Some days, I choose to be fragile, to pull the covers over my eyes, to cry my eyes out, to throw up, to stop eating, to stop talking, to stop existing. Some days, I decide to face it and to absorb everything that happens and formulate it into who I choose to become.

It isn’t always bad, feeling so much all at once. When happiness surrounds me and friends and family are around, I feel completely warm from the inside out. I wish that everyone could feel that kind of happiness because it is the most wonderful feeling in the entire world. People like me are blessed to be able to experience such comfort in their lives, but are sometimes cursed with the alternatives of deep sadness and regret as well.

I’d like to think that other than fragile, I’m more rugged. I understand that sometimes I appear irrational. The words that I hear and the emotions that I feel sometimes don’t coincide. I love too hard, I fight too long, and I cry too much, but I am as strong and capable as anyone.

I feel so much so that others don’t have to. I take on what they don’t want to see and I keep it locked away inside of myself, coming out in short bursts of anxiety and panic. I do that for you, for us, for the world, because not everyone can survive being the kind of person that I am.