I promised myself that I would not have postpartum depression this time, as if that’s a thing you can promise yourself. The truth is, it’s beyond our control. No person who has ever experienced a mental health challenge could control it, or we would choose not to.  Your body has experienced a great shift

As a full-time student and international student dealing with depression and anxiety daily, it is a struggle, primarily when you continually deal with hardships: homesickness, social difference, and all-around stress. Sometimes there are difficulties within people. Students who have experienced anxiousness or depressed feelings should know that they are not alone. It merely is not uncommon to feel this way—in particular, being involved in the university community.

When someone dies by suicide, everyone wonders “Why? How did it come to this?” and I understand that. It’s hard to conceive of a pain so great that it makes you not want to live anymore, but whether you’ve ever been there or not, it’s important to know that this place exists. It’s real and to judge a person who has been there as “weak” or “selfish” just shows that the level of judgment and hate that sent the person to that dark place to begin with is real and extremely problematic.

Growing up, I was always the quiet kid at the back of the classroom writing stories and song lyrics in the margins of my notebooks. Without anyone telling me to do so, I discovered that writing was my escape. No matter what was going on around me, I could create a world of my own through language and take refuge there for as long as I needed to.