To the person who does not understand my mental illness,

I hope you never have to. My mental illness is a daily struggle, with trying to figure out if what I am feeling is real or just some figment of my brain. It is a suffocating blanket that wraps around my very being, but unlike a regular blanket, it does not make me feel safe and warm. It makes me feel scared and cold. It causes me to lose hope and to drag myself into a pit because of the worthlessness it makes me feel. It is like going into a war only to find out that the enemy is your own self. It is only there to cause immense destruction, and for the most part of me it has. I hope you never have to go through what i have gone through. It has caused me to wish death upon myself, me, just knocking on deaths door and pleading with him to take me already. And each time Death denied me, like the world had done to me already, and shut the door. I have been lost and defeated, broken and angry, and mostly confused. How was I supposed to live life with these cars full of unbearable thoughts and ultimate fears speeding in circles on the racetrack of my brain. How was I going to get the pain to stop? I sat quietly in pain until I decided to start talking about it.

You see, that is where I found refuge. Although I took four years to choose that I was not going to let my illness control me, I still took the risk and got help. Now just because I got help does not mean that it is gone. My mental illness will probably never go away. In fact, I still have to deal with it every day. I still have my downs, I just know how to handle it. If something makes me unhappy, now, instead of wallowing in the pool of sorrow, I just tell those things goodbye. And recently I have been doing that more so now than ever.

So dear person who does not understand my mental illness, I ask for you to do something: accept me. Do not treat me like I am a fragile bird who has broken its wing, do not pity me for the fact that my brain is not quite normal, and do not charity me. Treat me like the strong person I know I am, the one who has battle scars and lived to prove that it does get better. Love me for the person I have become, and please know that my mental illness i not me, but only a part of me with a story to tell. I will live my life to the fullest and make the impossibles possible. Just wait and see.

From,

A person with a mental illness