Dear teenager,

Imagine a pile of bricks sitting on your chest: the crunching of bones, the sound of your lungs heaving to grasp some sort of oxygen, the dizziness you feel in your brain. Does it sound familiar to how you feel when anxiety wraps its sly bony fingers around you, or depression glues you to your bed for days and sucks every morsel of life out of you?

I have been there. I had nights where I didn't know if I would see morning. I had days where my friends and family could not get me to speak to them because I was so absorbed in my own dark hell and confined by the creeping black mold of depression and anxiety. My parents worried and were scared to leave me alone at home in fear that they would come home to a scene of suicide. I was completely broken and felt a deep void inside me, yet felt it filled with all the wrong things.

I tried drugs to make myself feel better: oxys, xans, percys. You name it, I tried it. I drank and drank and drank until I didn't know who I was or where I was or what day it was. I found false happiness in a chemical fix. I spent all of middle school and most of high school an outcast, but who had shut me out from everyone else? I did.

I thought everyone else's words had shut me out, but it was my reaction to those words that shut myself out! I realized last year, my final year of high school, that I had made myself miserable. It was a snowball effect. Someone was harsh to me, so I was harsh to myself, which made others see me as weak, which made me an easy target. I learned to brush off the negativity and despotic words, and learned to focus on improving myself. I invested myself fully in making my last year of high school awesome.

First, I changed my wardrobe to things that made me feel good about myself. I listened to upbeat music. I pampered myself. I ignored people that used to make me feel a burden on society. I became a beautiful, confident, happy person that could not let anyone get in her way. I invested myself fully in my own happiness, my family, my studies and my God. I graduated high school with honors, I read my Bible and try my best to help others, I spend time with my family, I surround myself with good company, I am starting college in my favorite place in the 'Ole North State' next month. But, most importantly, I am happy. The happiest I've ever been. I still have scars to remind me of what I have been through, but I embrace them as a sign of how far I have come.

Three years ago, I was sitting in the corner of my bathroom with the door locked, bawling my eyes out with my brother screaming to my mother on the phone to get home because I was in the bathroom with a knife trying to kill myself. Today I am surrounded by my family and friends, ready to embrace the life God gave me.

Like The Neighborhood said in their song "West Coast," "They say it's happy here / Happiness is figurative / I'm happy 'cause of me / Doesn't matter where I'm living."

Love, a girl who believes in you.