Sitting on a couch. Clock ticking away. The hour is paid for, but that is never my concern. Questions being asked. Hey, nice ficus. Tissues always an arm’s length away. Square picture frames, filled with dime a dozen impressionist landscapes, adorn the walls while faux Buddhist nick-nacks take up space on the plateaued surfaces of coffee tables and raised shelves. “How did that make you feel?” Oh yeah, I was in a therapist’s office.

It is cliché to address this current generation as the most drugged up in comparison to those of the past. Medication is sought through assortments of varying substances, changing states of matter, self-administered or prescribed. Pills popped for the misunderstood youth, alcohol boozed at the latest basher, ‘roids ripped by the star running back, or the “medicinal” cannabis toked behind the skate park. Of course all of these more or less outdated social stereotypes from popular culture. Delving away from the more ferocious narcos, the peer pressure stands as almost “everyone is doing it.” Behind the safety of closed doors, from prom royalty to the band crew or the non-extracurricular students, everyone may be doing it, some for less deviant reasons.

I sat in that comforted box, with the sound of the ocean playing in the waiting room to mask what was discussed within that sanctity, for forty-five minutes, near regularly every Monday, for about six months. That was over a year and a half ago. Now I know what you are thinking, “This kid’s quirky…so what'd you do?” Nothing, nothing physical that left any mark on the material world. More of an afterthought of the grunge scene, bottling my teen angst away, like my Irish ancestors before me, until the pressure built and the cork needed to be popped to ease it all out. Away from the vicinity of my mind, so it could once again be a free floating thought.

So many emotions flooding, overloading our brains, many too young to contextualize them to what they mean. Loneliness, depression, lack of self-esteem and confidence, distrust, plainly not knowing where you are going in life or the means to control the tracks of travel. So many ways to ease, to dispel, to silence the beasts, if only for a moment. Eating, drinking, smoking, harming, fighting, others far too inappropriate or violent, treatments later promoted to works of habit. Creativity remains the lone positive product to come out of our own dark pits of Tartarus. Art, music, poetry. Sculpting even our own flesh, feats of design in themselves, lifting, running, perfecting, therapy to soothe the soul. When there is a problem, we are all in a rush to get rid of it, like it is the next task on our to-do list, waiting to be checked off. If it is not, the problem persists, crisis control kicks in with a sense of urgency to oust the internal “infection.”

Even up to the end of my freshman year of college, I always held onto my mother’s passing from colon cancer when I was five. Therapists were no strangers to my household’s inhabitants. They aided in the sorting of emotional baggage from the aftermath. We all needed some help sifting through what made us react and learn to understand why. That feeling of…irregularity stuck with me for a while. I felt a stigmata for hailing from an imperfect family unit, distant from nuclear, dysfunctional a tad too harsh a label. But I already talked about that.

Charlie Bartlett, a humorous Ferris Bueller knock off for the millennial generation, explores the emotionally backed up high school environment. The titular character, after getting kicked out of various private academies for behavioral reasons, finds himself in the midst of the public school system. Charlie, himself avoiding confronting his father jailed for tax evasion, slowly but surely staples himself as the champion of his amassed confused peers in this high school misadventure. Overlooking the protagonist’s initial introduction as an innocent prescription drug dealer, Charlie finds himself listening to his classmates and genuinely wanting to help them, playing psychiatrist in a dirty high school bathroom. Charlie learns to discriminate who really needs prescription drugs to function, who abuses them, and, more importantly, who just needs to be listened to. The fact that he cares to hear out everyone else's problems before his own acts a good enough substitute to abstain from mischief. Suicide, attachment, inadequacy, and drug use are lightly toned in the teen dramedy, illustrating the pent up habits of youth culture, where taking something to make that feeling go away is not the same as talking about. And yes, that was Drake.

Some people argue that just possessing all these feelings, acting or not acting on them, seeking help for them, is a sign of weakness. Who thinks that? Macho men (not Randy Savage) and linebackers? Whoever played Hercules last? The strong silent type, Gary Cooper? If one relates the integral emotional complex of the human personality and the reliance of will on others to being weak, then that right there is probably the weakest thing I have ever heard. That way of thinking can most literally kill you, you know? Being weak and showing it, exposing one’s self, is the strongest act of courage one can do. Whoever thinks being weak is a sign of weakness are probably the same people that fast forward past Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist sessions. Egos' main functions should be to Sherpa us to the top of the mountain, not to blind us from the transfixing drop to come if we lose our upwards momentum. I wrote this, so does that make me weak?

Shielded from under the covers, bed sheet clad, wasting the day away in bed. That one song reminiscent of that one time, inducing a feel good chemical explosion in the brain. The sought after freedom indulging in extended car rides, gassing down the one county road enabling speeding over 50 mph. The dichotomy of single agitations against others even though their company pushes it away, back out of the mind. Sitting in the fantasy of avoiding realizations that there is a problem, convinced the scripted fiction rehearsed in the head cannot be truth if the lines are never uttered. We have all been there. The prom queen with a disintegrating home life, academic wizards too anxious to raise their hand to speak up, the musicians- just look at the late Kurt Cobain! The title of the Nirvana song "Lithium" is the medical treatment for depression, his music being an expression of Cobain’s own inner turmoil. We really do not know what others are going through. The best of friends may be the most distanced strangers when doors are closed and the locks turned. No one recognizes the echo of pain because most suffer in silence.

Society’s standardized normality draws the boundary of how we should think, feel, or act. Think, feel, act this way and you will have steered clear of trouble’s clouds. What procedure do we follow for if we think, feel, or act anything but normal? Is it normal to force away such inner developments? Those alien emotions sweltering are not normal because they are a part of you. No one is “normal”, and “popularity” is a concept director John Hughes (Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles) invented to show how whimsical being unconventional can be. In terms of non-endangering emotions, feel sad, get mad, let the smallest victories embrace you, hit a punching bag (not your dad), cry if you have to. Most importantly, say something to someone about it if it is that important, if it is twisting you and misshaping you on the inside. They will be enheartened to be trusted with your consolation. That is a human effect of the human connection.

Many see professionals for all kinds of reasons. The rage caged inside the steaming oven, boiling with short tempers and inclined to defend one’s honor, predisposed for anger, rising to a smoldering wrath waiting for the trigger. Swirling anxiety buzzing with notions of judgement in the cafeteria, going as far as snapping thoughts of interpersonal connections, crippling chances of contact and communication to others. Grayness, lack of colorful shading for the few unable to feel anything whatsoever, while the sensory overload of everything in the world snaps the pencil of stress. From both sides of the spectrums, people are seeking help, the ones we see, those close enough to identify with, are the much milder cases. On the far side, who, with informed knowledge, we cannot imagine relating to, being extreme rarities.

I got “help,” if you want to emphasize being a typical “depressed” teenager that much. It has become more of an archetype than an outlier. Admittedly, I stopped cold turkey-esque. I did not need it anymore. It was just a reminder of how I used to feel and going there just made me feel that way again. Questions ran dry, prodding for answers when there were none left to give. I never took anything. Talking is a drug that can be a long way out, but more gratifying in the end, when it is all said and done- that is what I "took." Fewer and fewer mornings I woke up, with only single shreds of cathartic moments to cling to, before switching modes. Those moments no longer became cathartic because there was nothing left to relieve anymore, no more repressions. If you want someone willing to listen, and you do not need to spend a dime, look around. There will always be your family -- who you probably do not want to worry with the specific details- and then there are your friends, an even greater support system, crutches that keep us upright. And between them ranges so many people, equipped with two ears, a mind, and a heart, that would love to be let in. You just have to undo the lock and open the front door. That is to say therapy was no longer necessary for me and one should never be discouraged from trying out professional help if the need intensifies.

Call me “sensitive” if you want, I do not know how that characteristic differentiates me from other people. If you are not sensitive to anything- your family, certain topics, moods, philosophies -- then really what are you sensitive towards? You are more desensitized, conditioned to react to a lot less than the usual person. Our first assignment is to feel, everything else after that is extra credit.

I had my ventilations: running, high physical activity releasing endorphins consuming any pessimisms, drawing, reading, writing, my friends. Thinking. If you have something itching your brain, scratching, clawing at your thoughts, excess thinking should be last homemade to try on. That is how false cognitions form, and from them stems anxiety, and other things that probably are not there, but are seen anyway because life will always be in your perspective. It is a familiarity dubbed "thinking into oblivion." You sit and think on something, you can let it fuel your drives, put the pencil to the paper, laugh it off with a cooler and good friends. But at the end of the day, no matter how much you sweat that nagging thought out, it was not enough, and it will replenish itself by morning’s rise. Nothing is as satisfying as saying it out loud to someone who wants to hear it, spin it back into what makes sense, and watch how insignificant it ultimately is. Watch the power float back into your orb and re-inventory it back into yourself.

Emotions are creatures that without proper supervision may run wild, rampant, and rampage. Your poisons have a tendency to pick you. Whatever you bore within, you were never incomplete with It. If anything, you were more human with It. It hid something from you, put it right under your nose, tricking you into believing you lost it forever. A warmth, a specialty, an importance. Something was taken off the shelves and you found out and you looked It in the eye and you overcame It. Conquering yourself, ironic you had to defeat a part of you to win a part of you back. You came out of the mess bigger than ever before, proportionally greater than the former shrinkage of self, discarded feelings of being insectile.

It is okay to not be okay. Despite a too proud population adhering to privacy, many of us are not okay and we are open to admitting that. If anyone could alchemize our lead essences to gold, then we all would. Accepting that creeping unease turning inside is the first step in getting through it. And that is one of the many paths we choose to follow in life. Walking through the shadowy doppelganger only you can see behind the looking glass brings you closer to becoming the masters of your own universe. Now enough flowery language, be unbound by your constrictions and join the rest of the world to revel in it.