A stream of decay was all that coursed through my blood. Tears of regret and anger pounded at my eyeballs, fighting to get out. A hollow feeling occupied the core of my stomach; bottomless, and void of substance. I was giving my best effort to barricade myself from the flood of emotions that built up to this point inside of me as I sat in this little white, lonely room at the end of the hall of my high school’s office building. It was a busy, early afternoon weekday and I could hear the clock tick in the background of the emptiness that filled the room as I watched the tall glass door, waiting for the counselor to come in. I knew in the back of my mind that this was the conversation that would either save or break the stitch that was still holding me together.
It is never an easy task to accept the fact that help is a necessary factor on the road to getting better. The avoidance of this fact for somewhere in the range of 4 years led me to the conclusion that I was alone in the efforts to reignite the tiny flame inside of me. Not that I was officially diagnosed with depression, but I definitely felt like I had fallen that far down a dark hole. Such a simplicity as being crushed by the coming down of your first middle school relationship was enough to break me, or at least open up the first of many cracks down the road of self-neglect and self-abuse. Yet, instead of confronting the issues that began to open up, I could only aimlessly walk down that road, hoping to find some revelation that it would all be okay. In the end, is that not what we all want, for there to be a sense of calm? To know that even though we are in the middle of the storm, there will be peace at the eye of it? That is precisely what I was searching for the day I was called out of my high school biology class during my sophomore year – I was done holding my hand out waiting for someone to grasp it and pull me back up. However, I realized that help does not always come in the form that you hope for it to manifest.
I arrived to my high school, Rio Mesa, after a short drive at the start of my sophomore year in 2012. I walked across the same patch of grass I always would to get into my late-morning biology class. I was nervous and a little nauseous, not expecting much to happen on the first couple days of school. My teacher, Ms.Jo, was Korean, tall and white-skinned, possibly in her late 20’s. She had a kind-sounding voice that never made you feel violated; more or less it made you feel a sense of safety when you entered the classroom. Ms.Jo started off the class as most teachers would at the start of a new school year. She maneuvered around the sea of desks and students, handing out an introduction worksheet to every one of us. The room was silent and blanketed in a white florescent light as I skimmed through the worksheet. The last question was not entirely a question, it gave us the option to include additional information that she had not originally asked. Although the addition of extra information was completely optional, I felt as though I needed to include something more about myself. I began to write what turned out to be more of a confession of what I felt; something that I rarely ever told anyone. As I finished writing, the paper confessed, “I can’t explain why, but I feel like I am chronically depressed.” That single sentence, although cliché in nature, was one of the single hardest pairing of words I had written down. Unknowingly though, I was setting off a chain reaction, solely by the admittance of my depression to an adult I felt I could confide in.
For the next couple of weeks after the start of the 2012 school year, I would come to school and drag myself into my biology class carelessly sitting at my desk towards the back of the classroom, 2nd to last row at a corner seat. I had concluded that my confession to her at the start of the year would simply be looked over, just another person that did not give much care or thought to a teenager with depression. However, this was proven false on October 24, 2013.
As I was sitting in my seat towards the back of the classroom, the phone rang, echoing throughout the room. The ringing somehow particularly caught my attention, as if I had suddenly gained a sixth sense. I could feel a nervousness and aching hollowness creep up onto me as Ms.Jo walked over to the black-painted telephone. “Hello, room 24, Ms.Jo speaking.” I could only sit and impatiently wait for her to hang up the phone. “Alexandro,” as Ms.Jo would always say my first name in its entirety, “can I talk to you outside for a moment please? You can leave your things at your desk; you won’t be gone too long.” Little did anyone know that that was the one thing I was wishing for at that precise moment, to be gone. I imagined myself running away, as if from a storm, towards the infinite strawberry fields that surrounded our school. That was not the case though, that was a different reality, but in this reality, whatever was coming was going to hit me like a train, and I could only hold a poker face. “The reason I’m talking to you out here is because this is concerning what you told me at the start of the school year, about your depression,” Ms.Jo announced in a soft, innocent manner. However, I could only look her in the eyes and turn away repeatedly, fighting to hold in floods of tears. “The phone call I received right now was from the school’s psychologist. She wants you to go to her office right now so that the two of you can discuss this in private before it gets worse.” Even under the softness of her voice I could sense that she felt hurt, not because she was disappointed in me, but because she knew that what she had done could come off as betrayal instead of help.
I felt my feet becoming more and more weighted as I made my way to the psychologist’s office. The emptiness in the pit of my stomach was still very much present, accompanied by a sense of helplessness and confusion as to what would be expected from me. “What am I supposed to say, my darkest secrets? Explain the feeling of aliveness from cold stainless steel etching my confessions onto my skin? Do I take her step-by-step into the crevices scattered across my heart?” These thoughts were the only things running around in my already exploding mind. The one thing that I did know for sure was that I did not want her sympathy, only help. In my mind, there is a difference. I pulled open the blue, metal door and walked into the dentist-like office, thankfully there was no essence of an actual dentist office in the air. Only gleaming, white walls lined with cliché inspirational posters and a desk of a doctor or secretary served as company as the counselor was not yet in the room, so I had a few moments to collect myself. There was little success in that though, as I was still fighting back tears as the psychologist opened the door to her office. “Hello, Alexandro, right?” She asked me as she sat down behind her wooden desk, pulling out a file from an organized, little paper stack. She continued to ask me how I was doing until she finally got to the main reason for wanting to talk to me, “What’s been bothering you?” I could only tell her the same thing that I had told Ms.Jo; unfortunately, she wanted reasons for my depression. “I’ve just been feeling like there’s an empty feeling inside of me for the past 4 years. I have not been able to find a way to explain this feeling,” I told her, gripping my chair trying to control the shakiness in my voice; however, I could tell that she wasn’t exactly satisfied with my answer. She spoke to me as she was writing down notes in the file she had pulled out, “I think you’re fine, Alexandro. It’s normal to feel the things you’re feeling,” as if she expected this to be a call for attention. The psychologist finished our meeting with the offering of her continued assistance and supervision of how I was feeling. Knowing that she was simply reciting the general lines that she would to almost any student that walked though her door, I walked out of her office, overwhelmed with an anger I had rarely felt.
The meeting with my school’s psychologist may have been something that I would have preferred to have avoided. I confided my deepest feelings with an adult that I did not expect to care; consequently, she took action and contacted the only person qualified to help. Ms.Jo only wanted to get me started in the right direction. I assume she could see that I was otherwise lost, sinking farther down into an abyss. Although no significance came out of the meeting itself, it did make me see that it was up to me to find it in myself to have the will to improve or else no one would be able to. I realized that this was the first of many revelations as I entered the classroom to my biology class and sat back down in my seat. I had no idea what I was supposed to do next, but I knew that people can be accepting and mutually care about someone they know is not doing okay.
In society we are taught that there is a standard normality that must be achieved to fit into our modern communities. When there are those of us that are either emotionally damned or psychologically different, we feel isolated from these communities. Whether they’re family, friends, classmates, etc., we feel a sense of separation; thus, introvertedness becomes innate. However, we often come to the conclusion that we have been forgotten and fail to search for open arms. Sometimes we must allow someone else to force us to hold our hands out again, even when we have already surrendered to ourselves.
