You probably couldn't pick her out in a crowd, but trust me, she's there. She has a calm demeanor, and she seems happy. At peace, even. The only thing that seems out of the ordinary about her is her nervous habits of biting her lip and pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose even when they aren't falling off. She's tried numerous times to 'cut that out' as her family likes to say, but she can't. Hell, they were a part of her at this point. They weren't going anywhere, but she wanted more than anything to be able to quit. After all, they were the only things that could give her away.
The seemingly harmless habits she had adopted were the only physical signs of everything that was plaguing her mind. She walked and talked like a normal teenage girl, but she was anything but. She awoke everyday suffering from anxiety and depression, but she was the only one who knew. Nobody else was aware of her fear to live and the uncontrollable desire to simply lay in bed all day with no knowledge of what was happening in the world around her.
Everything hurts, but she can't let it show. To the world, she is the fun and bubbly girl that is living the best version of her life. But to herself, she is drowning. She is sinking so painfully fast, but nobody knows. She wants to scream for help, but she can't. She has to be the girl that everybody wants her to be. Not the girl that she really is. So she goes to school, football games, and parties with a smile on her face. She laughs; smiles; and socializes, but she knows that if someone took a chisel to her skin, her happy exterior would break to reveal the hopelessly scared and sad girl on the interior.
So here she is, smiling and nodding along at another party as she is surrounded by a number of faces who will never know. She takes a deep breath and agrees to hop to the next gathering because she doesn't know what else to do. What is she supposed to do? This is all she knows. She doesn't know how to be anybody else.
Fake it til you make it, right?
She laughs when her friend tells a joke as they walk to the car to make their way to the next party. She doesn't even realize that she's biting her lip and pushing her glasses up her nose. Nobody else notices either.
Her heart and her mind hurt constantly, and it is because of this that she finds herself undoubtedly checking in on other people. "Are you okay?" rolls off her bitten lips because she knows what it's like to hurt without anybody knowing. Each time they utter a response of, "yes, I'm fine." But are they? She will never know. It is a never-ending cycle of hiding the seemingly endless pain that haunts people all around us. It's the stigma on mental illness that prevents people from speaking of what they really feel. This is what it's like to be the girl with anxiety and depression.
