LOZ • Non-Binary
It feels like I’ve been friends with depression and anxiety for longer than I have been connected to another human by choice. Generally, when someone asks when my journey began, I say that class 9 was probably it, with things getting worse with every passing year.
But honestly? I don’t think that’s true.
There’s something to be said about sad children that people overlook, or at least in my generation’s childhood, they did. I was categorized as the quiet, hard-working kid and left at that. However, when I look back, all I can remember is being scared all the time—scared of being left behind, of not being enough, of being a burden on the people around me.
The time spent alone was a choice that I should not have made, but I did anyway.
Over the years, I found some people I felt comfortable with, took to saving notes and messages from them as reminders to see whenever I was caught up in my head.
And then those people left.
New ones came in, and they left too.
It has been a long learning process to acknowledge and be okay with the fact that any lives that cross mine are probably intersecting for a short duration.
Every beginning brings an end with it, and that’s okay.
It’s the in-between that matters.
So now I don’t see moments through the lens of future nostalgia; I see them as they are, in the present. That helps, most of the time. The other times are what I go to therapy for. It’s been a long trip, and the road that I have yet not traveled is a long one, but that’s okay. Some days I feel like it is too much to handle, but other days I know that there are reasons for me to live another day.
And that’s enough.
