During March of my sixteenth year, I snapped in half.

I had wreaked some minor havoc on myself leading up to this point as my mental health fluctuated between mild highs and brutal lows during the preceding six months, but on this particular Wednesday night my brain had ripped itself from my body. A swampy fog of depression sent me into a state of restlessness; my thoughts transmuted from incoherent sentences to blaring static fuzz. As I lay staring at the ceiling, I felt a desperate need to tear myself out of the skin that bound me to existence and transcend reality. Where are you supposed to go when your skeleton makes you claustrophobic, when a day of being alive leaves you drained? There was an obvious answer to these questions, but even the thought of that was too much. I can no longer recall what brought on this state of despair, but it’s not unlikely that something small and petty had pushed me to my breaking point— the peak of the painfully slow crescendo leading to this meltdown.

In my experience, there are two types of depression:  the sedentary kind that strips you of all willpower and leaves you decaying in bed for days, and the kind that demands to be acted upon in any destructive way possible. And on that March night, I was itching to grab hold of some scissors. This wasn’t hard to do. I kept a pair in my nightstand for emergencies.

As if on autopilot, I heaved myself from my bed and hobbled over to the sink, coping mechanism of choice in hand. The mirror that hung above the faucet held a strange, distorted figure within its frame. I stared myself down, not really registering the cluster of features that hovered before me. There was a nose… and beneath it a small mouth… two ears on the side, two eyes near the middle … but none of these attributes seemed to be connected. Discrete and free-floating, they swam before me as if they belonged to no face at all. Had this image of my supposed self become so familiar that it was beyond recognition? It was a terrifying question, one I had already answered. I knew what I had to do. I was ready.

My gaze settled on the mane of hair that lay just past my shoulders, limp and muddy blonde. A few wisps were plastered to my forehead with sweat. In the sickly yellow light that illuminated the bathroom, the frizz encircling my head looked like a halo. I felt like hell.

People had always admired my hair, and weren’t shy in telling me so. When I was younger, my neighbor, a man with a kind smile, had told me to never change it. “Your hair is so beautiful,” he had said. “You are very special to have a head like that.” My grandmother had cooed about how wavy, how silvery-blonde it was. Old ladies at a nursing home I volunteered at were enthusiastic to brush it when I visited. My friends, taking each strand so gently into their hands and weaving it into braids, urged me to grow it longer, longer.

I remembered each of these instances well as I peered at my own shape in the mirror, and it took one heartbeat to decide I didn’t care.  I grabbed a fistful of hair and chopped it off in a satisfying snip. There went familiarity, there went doubt— another clean slice sent dysphoria drifting to the tile floor— stress fell onto my shirt. I worked fast to allow myself as little time as possible to process my actions. This is what had to be done. Any premature regrets were sheared off with the rest of the unnecessary weight that strained my shoulders. Snip, snip, and a clump of frustration tumbled to the ground like the useless, dead thing it was. As I chopped away, the dull ache in my chest eased up, just a little, just enough to make me feel okay. The last piece remaining was shame, and once it was severed I placidly put down my scissors.

A nose, a small mouth, two ears on the side, two eyes in the middle. It was all there, but I could see this same face in different way than I had before. The features ceased to swim, and instead settled into their respective places. This was a peculiar face. This was a stranger with a choppy, lop-sided bob who I had accidently locked gazes with in passing and now could no longer look away from. And yet, this was me. With a smile I shook my head and felt the ends of my hair brush my cheeks and nose, and I touched the back of my now-exposed neck. A sense of calm washed over me.  This small change felt like a much bigger transformation— my past self was shed, and in its place was someone much stronger. In this new world, there were acquaintances to re-meet, well-known places to re-discover. Who knew you could cure depression with an act of desperation— the space inside my skeleton felt a little bit roomier, at least for the time being. The anxiety of facing my family and peers the next day wouldn’t set in until morning; at that moment, I stood in the eye of the hurricane, the shreds of my cocoon lying at my feet.