When I told my father my best friend started taking medicine for her anxiety, he told me: "Oh, I'm sorry to hear she couldn't handle it. I thought she was stronger than that."

When I told my mother I thought I had something mentally wrong with me, she told me: "Oh, you just think you do because your two best friends are on pills."

When I finally started taking my own medicine for anxiety, I was worried about saying anything to my mother about it because she's never liked the idea of me taking pills. "It'll change you," she told me.

I remember thinking: Isn't that the point? Because medicine is meant to help.

If someone has high blood pressure, they take medicine to help lower it. They're changing the way their body works. Nobody really questions that because it's what that person has to do to stay healthy (or become healthy again).

Then why do people question it when it comes to mental illnesses? You don't hear people saying, "Oh I'm sorry you lost the battle with your blood pressure," so why do we hear people say, "I'm sorry you lost the battle with your anxiety?"

Why is there a difference between needing medicine for a physical illness and needing medicine for a mental illness?

It all comes back to stigma. For some reason, there's the idea that people who have a mental illness are somehow "weak" for seeking help or taking medication. Which, let me say, is not true.

My best friend did not "lose" against her anxiety because she needed pills to get things done. She knew she needed help and sought that necessary help in order to actually function in her everyday life.

I am not "weaker" for accepting that I need help and seeking the medication I need to help myself. I knew I had problems because I've had chest pains for five years and never really knew why. When I finally went to a doctor and discussed things (and after an EKG and a blood test), it was deemed that I get anxiety-related chest pains.

AKA, I get seemingly-random feelings of suffocating, and occasionally my heart feels like it's being stabbed and twisted around. Sometimes I'm anxious or stressed, and sometimes I don't feel stressed at all. Until, of course, I feel like I'm about to fall dead.

Before I started taking my medicine, I had to work myself into tears so I could get things done. Stress, cry, recover, lose sense of emotions, be productive. That was how I did things.

After starting my medicine, I can manage things better. Things aren't perfect, but I no longer cry at the thought of making a phone call. I still get the occasional chest pain, but I can deal with it better now. It's rarer, less intense.

The biggest change for me (and likely everyone else who has to take medicine because of a mental illness) is this: I finally feel like a human.

Yes, medicine does "change" a person, but that's the point of it.

We all have different needs. We all fight different battles.