School can be tough. You have to somehow figure out how to multi-manage your school work, your social life, your extracurricular activities and sometimes, when life doesn’t think all of that is already enough, depression.

Now, I’m not talking about the “I just failed my test” or “the love of my life just broke up with me” or even the “I’m so stressed and nothing is going my way” depression. I’m talking about the stone cold, numb to the core, depression.

Shocking, I know.

Shocking that there are people that deal with this every single day. Shocking that there are people, who by some miracle, figure out how to balance it alongside their school work, social life and everything in between. Shocking that some of you don’t even know you know these people.

Depression can arise from a multitude of things. However, the thing that’s most important to know when reading this article is that depression is a medical condition -- not a choice, not a joke and most certainly not a word that should be used lightly.

The thing about school is that society has placed so much pressure on us to get good grades, to know exactly what we want and to never, under any circumstances, falter from the path of excellence. They implant these standards into our heads without a second thought. They don’t understand that for some of us, this means sacrificing our mental health.

It means forcing ourselves to wake up and go to school everyday, even if our bodies and minds are numb. It means studying into the early hours, where our brain most loves to overthink. It means pushing ourselves far past what excellence really means, purely for the idea that we will finally become socially accepted. It means far more than anyone could ever understand.

Then there’s the idea of friends. Friends are supposed to be these people who know you inside and out, who willingly accept your invitation to binge eat ice cream every weekend and who always encourage your unhealthy obsession with clothes and occasionally boy-bands.

Now let’s add depression into the mix.

For starters, everything that once seemed easy, becomes a chore. Talking to people, introducing yourself, making the effort to go out every weekend; it all becomes added stress. You constantly overthink every little action you do and every situation you’re in. If someone looks at you weird, you start envisioning how you came across, how you aren’t happy enough or how your effort might be lacking. So you step it up. You force yourself to act better.

If someone laughs in your direction, you stop whatever you’re doing. You make yourself smaller and smaller until you are nothing more than an idea in your head. If someone tells you you did something wrong, you break. You tell yourself you’re worthless and you end that idea.

It’s hard to stop that process too. It’s not something you can just turn off. It’s something you have to fight -- and I’m sure now you can begin to imagine what that feels like.

It feels pretty crappy, doesn’t it?

But we smile. We smile because we don’t want you to worry. We smile because eventually we may need it. We smile because we want to remind ourselves what it looks like -- because it’s hard to remember when you’ve got a full agenda.