“You said the world is full of darkness because you never opened your eyes.”

The room was entirely quiet, filled up with blackness. The door had been locked from the inside, and the curtain blocked the last entrance that connected to the outside world. “Bzzt,” with the light from the phone’s screen, a boy could be vaguely seen, sitting at the edge of the bed. His eyes looked numbly into the wall in front of him. It would be hard to even distinguish him if someone put him into a crowd of marionettes. 

“You are ill, you are suffering, depression is something you should have to be aware of!”

“You have a mental problem, you are in the special group.”

“People like you are crazy, you are so different from us.”

After that was the laughter and giggles. All of these talks had scratched his body and brought the boy into an endless painful loop.  The words were turning to some sort of thorns, wrapped around the heart of the boy, hidden from others, buried at the bottom of the ocean. The moon was very bright that night, but he couldn’t see it. The quarrel on the other side of the door never stopped, but he didn’t pay any attention to that. The lively atmosphere spread all over the world, just none of them belonged to him. 

The boy swallowed his secrets, then covered his scarred body with the quilt. This boy had been told that he was suffering from depression, and this boy is me. 

A few weeks ago,  I was still having fun at school, hanging out with my buddies and we were still making jokes about each other. When the sky was still painted in light blue, some marshmallows were floating along with it. When everything was still in color, I was still an ordinary boy. Then everything in my life changed after that day. 

The speech was awful and boring, but we were required to stay until the speaker finished up her wordy presentation. That speaker was a doctor or a professional in psychology, at least she told us so. She came here to have a presentation about depression, which she believed was one of the most threatening things that some students around our age would face. She told us that depression was a kind of mental illness, which probably would cause you to start to hurt yourself after a while. 

“You all need to take this seriously, I am not joking with you guys,” she said. “Remember to put a checkmark inside the box.”

Then she passed out a form with lists of some “symptoms” that people would have when they were at the stage of mild depression, and a box was next to each of the symptoms. I took it lightly since I never had thought about if it was something related to myself. 

After completing the form, I folded it immediately. Checkmarks were nearly everywhere on that form, and I was afraid to let other people see them. I was at a loss, my brain wasn’t working at all, and I didn’t even respond to my friends when they were asking about the results in a relaxing way. For the rest of that day, I could not concentrate on anything that I was working on, I was just not in the right mood. 

After a few days, that psychologist asked me to see her, and we had a serious conversation. She showed me the results, and I knew it was not good. I tried to convince her that I was doing all right, but I barely had the situation listed in the form. I enjoyed my life and the things around me, but she was not listening to what I was saying. She told me that I needed to receive the treatment as soon as possible; otherwise, the consequences would be very severe. I was stunned. Since that day, I am no longer the same person I used to be. I was afraid to talk to my classmates, even my friends, while I was at school. I stayed away from the crowds, although nobody wanted to exclude me from them. My teachers worried about me when I stopped turning in my homework. My parents were panicking when they saw me spending all of my time chatting and playing video games. I didn’t like who I was during that time, but that was what happened after all. When everyone cared about me, I refused their help and pretended I was all by myself. 

It was me, I am the one that turned myself into a person who suffered from “depression” in their words. So I figured out that I should have faith in myself. I was ill on the eighth day of the week, and I was so close that one of my feet had already stepped into that zone. I noticed that the things I had gone through in my life didn’t end up in depression directly. I knew that I was not the only person who went through these things as well, every one of us would face them at some period in our lives, and all we needed to do is to survive them. We all know that the dawn came after the nights.