A crushing weight, my depression has been at points a Mt. Everest; a near impossible climb. This climb is met with a jackhammering heart and a lack of ambition. During this journey, I find myself repeatedly slipping on the ice and landing at the foot of the mountain. Defeated, I stare at the sky pondering my mere existence before I can pick myself off of the ground and give it another try.

This is the daily routine for some that suffer from depression and instead of a literal mountain they are laying in bed trying their best to sit up and start their day, to go to work and function.

Depression is rather common and many people suffer in a relative silence, for the fear of the stigma that is attached to it. Reaching out for help is hard for those suffering because explaining the things that run through their head to someone else seems harder than dealing with what is hurting them on their own.

So the depressed person keeps their mouth shut because they don’t want to be that guy or girl who is known as a downer and they don’t want to push their problems onto someone else.

When I became depressed my freshman year of high school I was in heaps of denial to the point where I refused help because I was after all okay.

I was okay until the thoughts became too much to bear on my own.

And since I had so much practice not saying what I felt, like many others who suffer. I froze when I sat across from a therapist for the first time. I couldn’t find the words to say. There was so much going on and I felt like I was a prisoner in my own skin but I couldn’t say it, because to me if I said it out loud that meant it was real and that meant that someone else knew how I felt and what I thought about, and the sense of how vulnerable that would make me twisted my tongue and took the breath from my lungs.

So I found an alternative.

One night I sat and wrote my story. I wrote about the things that had happened and how they made me feel, it was raw and unedited; I found it much easier for me to write opposed to saying something out loud. So I turned to the journal and wrote of my struggles and put the thoughts that consumed my brain on paper and I found some relief.

After many months of writing, I found myself looking back at some of the things that I had written and was surprised at how poetic some of the free writing was. That was the day that I sat down and decided to write my first poem and that’s when I realized words are powerful, even if you can’t say them out loud. I found my expression in poetry. Sometimes I still forget the power of words, words that can hold us captive if we let them can be made known with a stroke of a pen or the tapping of keys. Don’t allow yourself to be bound by the chains of vulnerability.