A Open Letter to My Mental Illness

Dear Mental Illness,

Our relationship has always been complicated. You’ve been both a teacher and a tormentor, a mirror and a mystery that I’ve spent years trying to understand.

My battle with mental health began very young, but the first time I recognized the deterioration of my mind was at the age of seven. It wasn’t marked by a single dramatic breakdown or a moment anyone else would have labeled as “serious” at the time. Instead, it revealed itself quietly, in small shifts I didn’t yet notice. I began to see the way my thoughts moved — faster, sharper, more critical than they had been before. I felt things more intensely than I knew what to do with, and I carried them inward rather than letting them surface.

At seven, I was still light, playful, and somewhat happy — yet inside, something had already begun to fracture. The turmoil in my own home didn’t help either. I learned early how to smile while my mind spiraled, how to appear okay even when I dissociate, and my thoughts wouldn’t settle. No one could see the battle forming, but I felt it growing beneath my skin.

The first time I battled heavily with my mental health was in 2014. Around that time, I had learned of my uncle’s mental illness struggles. I was in the middle of band class when my phone started ringing.

It wasn’t supposed to ring at this time. For band, phones were supposed to be silent, tucked away, and forgotten for 40 minutes. But it kept vibrating against my stand, insistent, urgent, as if it knew something I didn’t want to know. I remember opening my phone and seeing the article in my messages. When I read it, the room didn’t get louder or quieter — it simply shifted. The music, the scraping chairs, the murmurs of my classmates all receded to the background, as if I were suddenly underwater listening to life from a distance.

The words on the screen felt heavier than they should have. They didn’t just describe what happened to my uncle; they seemed to reach toward me, tugging at something I had been carrying since I was seven but never knew how to name.

Mental Illness.

My chest tightened. My breath changed. My mind began racing with questions about him, about myself, even life as I knew it. I wanted to put the phone down, pretend I hadn’t seen it, step back into class as if nothing had happened. But my face had already told the world how I felt before a word even left my mouth.

“What is the baby crying about now?”

The words cut sharper than I expected. They weren’t shouted, but they didn’t need to be. They carried impatience, dismissal, and a familiar sting that felt older than that moment. In front of me, I could feel my face burning, tears already gathering at the edges of my eyes before I had time to stop them.

I didn’t know how to explain what I had just read. I didn’t have the language for mental illness yet, let alone the courage to say that something inside me had just cracked open.

So I exploded.

Not in the way people write about rage as powerful or triumphant, but in the way it feels when a child has been holding too much for too long and finally runs out of places to put it. My words came out sharp, reckless, and unfiltered — more a reflex than a choice. The room fractured with me; chairs scraped, music stands shook, and the classroom order dissolved in a way that mirrored what was happening inside my mind.

I didn’t feel strong in that moment. I felt exposed, ashamed, and completely overwhelmed by my own emotions. As I left the room in tears, I remember thinking less about the girl’s comment and more about how out of control I felt in my own body. The chaos I had been carrying quietly for years had finally surfaced in a way I couldn’t contain. So, I ran out of the classroom and found a corner of my middle school to cry in.

In the hallway, everything went quiet again — too quiet. My chest still hurt, my breath still felt shallow, but beneath the noise of my reaction was something heavier: the realization that I was not okay, and that pretending otherwise was no longer enough.

For years, I cried out for help. Circled the “sometimes,” “most days,” and “all the time” in anxiety and depression screenings whenever my mom would leave the exam room. I filled them in carefully, quietly, as if those bubbles were the only language I had access to.

But when the nurse returned and asked, “Are you feeling safe?”

I hesitated.

After that, I learned to swallow my answers.

I glanced at the door, thought about the consequences of being honest, and then circled something safer — something manageable—something that wouldn’t disrupt the day. I wanted help, but I was afraid of what help might look like, of how much space my pain might take up if I finally let it be seen.

So you mainly remained invisible, Mental Illness, even as you grew louder inside me. I did what was expected of me. I went to school and excelled. I laughed with friends. I participated heavily in extracurricular activities. I appeared functional. But beneath all of that, I was constantly negotiating with my own mind — trying to predict my emotions, manage my reactions, and keep myself from spilling over in public again.

But, like always, you show up uninvited.

You arrive in quiet moments that are supposed to feel ordinary — sitting in class, riding in the car, lying in bed at night. You slip in through a thought, a memory, a sensation in my body I can’t quite name. Sometimes you come as restlessness, other times as heaviness, and sometimes as that strange feeling of being slightly detached from my own life.

I used to think your presence meant something was fundamentally wrong with me. That I was broken in a way others were not. I compared myself to my peers — the ones who seemed so effortlessly calm — and wondered why my mind felt like a storm I could never entirely outrun.

For a long time, I fought you.

I tried discipline. I tried distraction. I tried productivity. I tried being “strong.” I tried being silent. I tried being everything except honest about what I was carrying. But the more I resisted you, the heavier you became.

And at 19, I finally snapped.

Not in one dramatic moment that could be neatly explained, but in a slow unraveling that had been building for years. What had once been manageable waves became something closer to a flood — my thoughts felt faster, my emotions felt heavier, and my ability to keep up the performance of “okay” ran out.

My first stay in the hospital did not feel like a rescue at the time. It felt disorienting, embarrassing, and deeply vulnerable. The fluorescent lights were too bright. The routines were unfamiliar. The questions felt endless. I was suddenly in a space where I could not hide behind achievement, humor, or busyness — only my truth.

I remember sitting in those rooms and realizing how tired I was of fighting you alone.

For the first time, I was surrounded by professionals who spoke your language — words like anxiety, depression, trauma, and coping skills. Yet even there, I struggled with shame. I wondered how I had ended up in this place, why I couldn’t have handled things better, why I had let it get this far.

But the hospital also marked something I didn’t recognize at the time: the beginning of being seen.

For years, you had lived in silence, in hidden checkboxes, in swallowed answers, in the space between how I looked and how I felt. In that building, under those harsh lights, silence was no longer an option. My pain had a name. It took up space. It had witnesses.

I remember the strange mix of fear and relief that came with that realization. Fear because I could no longer pretend you weren’t real. Relief because, for once, I didn’t have to carry you alone.

Leaving the hospital meant going with a diagnosis. I received the initial diagnosis of Bipolar 1 with psychosis tendencies. You didn’t disappear. You didn’t pack your bags or retreat quietly into the background. If anything, our relationship became clearer — more direct, more honest, more complicated in a different way.

What changed was me.

I began to understand that you were not simply something to defeat or erase. You were something to learn how to live with, to listen to, and sometimes to set boundaries with. I started to see my reactions not as proof that I was “broken,” but as signals — messages my body and mind were sending when something needed care.

I did fight initially, mainly being prescribed medication for my mental illness.

To me, pills felt like proof that something inside me was permanently wrong. I feared what they might take from me — my creativity, my intensity, my personality, my sense of self. I worried that if I needed medication to function, I was no longer fully me. So I resisted. I questioned. I argued. I convinced myself I could manage you through sheer willpower if I just tried hard enough.

There were days I didn’t take them. Days I told myself I was fine without them. Days I romanticized my chaos as if it were simply part of my artistry rather than something that had nearly cost me my life.

But you didn’t loosen your grip just because I wanted you to.

Eventually, I had to confront an uncomfortable truth: my resistance wasn’t bravery — it was fear. Fear of being dependent, fear of being labeled, fear of being different in a way that felt permanent.

Slowly, with time, I began to understand medication differently. Not as a punishment or a weakness, but as a tool — like glasses for a mind that had been straining to see clearly for years. It didn’t erase you, Mental Illness, but it softened your edges enough for me to breathe, think, and choose rather than react.

There were still hard days. There still are. Medication did not make you vanish. A rediagnosis didn’t give me peace. Therapy did not make you disappear. Healing did not mean the storm was gone forever.

But it gave me space.

Space to notice my thoughts before they swallowed me.

Space to feel deeply without drowning in it.

Space to exist in my body without constantly fighting it.

In learning to accept help, I began to change how I spoke to myself. Instead of asking, Why am I like this? I started asking, What do I need right now? Instead of punishing myself for struggling, I practiced — imperfectly — meeting myself with curiosity instead of contempt.

Our relationship is still complicated.

You still show up.

You still surprise me.

You still test my boundaries.

But I am no longer at your mercy.

I have language now.

I have support.

I have tools.

And I have a self that is no longer ashamed of needing them.

So this is not a goodbye. It is a truce of sorts — a commitment to coexistence rather than war.

You are part of my story, but you are not the author of it. Between my chaos and my calm, I am learning to stand.

Yours,

Maj