"What's depression like?" He asked.

Rambles of my mind

My depression started quite a long time ago. I think it was middle school, when I was around 13. Depression isn't something that hits you all of the sudden. It's not that one morning you wake up and you feel miserable and everything around you has suddenly become irrelevant. 

It sneeks up on you, like a hunter approaches his prey slowly and silently. That's one of the most dangerous things about depression: it's a long, but most of all, silent process. A lot of family members, friends and teachers don't notice the small changes in someone. 

When the person starts eating less. Or stays inside a lot. When the person starts to talk less and less until he or she is completely quiet. When the person starts to look exhausted, as if he or she forgot what sleep is. When the person hides away from big crowds, scared of judging looks and loud noises.

All of this happens over a period of time. This can be months, weeks and sometimes years, until things get really bad. Until this person starts to think about suicide and selfharm. Until this person stays up every night till 3 am. because their thoughts keep them awake and they can't do anything but cry themselves to sleep. 

Even the ones you'd never expect to become depressed, can become depressed. The girl in your class that laughs a lot, the guy that's amazing at sports, the girl who gets a lot of attention from everybody. It doesn't matter if they're smart, succesful, beautiful or talented: they can still become depressed.

And that's what makes depression so extremely dangerous. When people hear the word "depression" they think of people with terrible lives who have nothing to live for and so become depressed, but this isn't the truth. You don't have to have a terrible life or abusive parents or have one of your parents die on you or your best friend getting ill. You can have a perfectly fine life and still get sadder and sadder every day. 

And you can get mad at all the people around you who have it better than you, but you never know what hides inside of them. Maybe they're fighting demons like you, because things often aren't how you think you are.

Maybe you are one of those people. One of those people that has a perfectly fine life, but still feels sadder and sadder every day. 

People are often cruel to each other. Sometimes this is because they need to find a way to forget about their own pain and sometimes it is because they're truly horrible people. Even if you are being bullied or getting called names, don't become one of them. Don't get the feeling like you need to be cruel back, simply because they're being cruel to you.

It's a chain, you see. People who are being treated terribly, will start to treat others terribly. Maybe because they think it's normal, maybe because they don't control it anymore and maybe because they feel like nobody understands them and want to make someone feel the way they've been feeling. 

And the only one who can stop this kind of chain, is you. 

I've been treated wrongly for a long time. I've been kicked down, pushed around, called names and beat up, multiple times. But I've promised myself to never become like that. No matter how bad tings get, no matter how evil people become towards me, I will not let it influence the way I treat others. Because nobody deserves to be treated the way I've been treated and how probably some of you have been treated.

This was a bit of a rambly post. Mainly because I didn't think about what to write before I started writing, which is one of the things I like most about writing this book. To just sit down and write down the things that go through my mind at that point.

I think that if you read closely, you might find some messages that matter and I hope you will think back about those messages when you find yourself in a situation where they're relevant. 

I want to thank you all for your support in the past few days, where I was feeling slightly worse than normally. 

So thank you.

- Kyran