Depression and All Her Casualties by Allison Hsu (17, California)

 [Content Warning : depression and allusions to suicidal ideation]       

          The worst thing ever said to me was by the psychiatrist, who I met with a week after I was accepted into therapy. She wasn’t nearly as gentle as the therapist from the week before, and her eyes didn’t brim with concern like the counselor at school. Instead, she looked me hard in the eyes as I cried, and told me “Honey, it’s no one’s job to fix you. That’s your job only. No one else can fix you.”
          I wanted to scream when she told me that, but I stayed sitting with my hands under my thighs on the cold leather couch, watching as she filled out a form that she would later hand to me, confirming that I was officially depressed.
             No one else can fix you.

          ​Her words rang in my ears the whole way home from the office, and I would
eventually watch as everyone in my life came to the same conclusion.
          I saw it in Dad when he accused me of faking the depression for attention. If
you’re so depressed why haven’t you tried to kill yourself yet? He shouted, his hands
slamming on the dining room table. Because there’s nothing in this damn house to do it
with! I shouted back. That shut him up good. And it was the first time I’d seen him cry.
          I saw it in Grace’s worried frown when I’d sobbed through an entire weekend and
all I could do was stare as she dropped her favorite stuffed animal at the foot of my bed
and quietly left the room.
          I saw it in Becca’s knitted brows and glances at the floor between every sentence
that month when I barely showed up to school, thinking twice through every word as if
whatever she chose to say to me could be the last. The hugs that she pulled me into
whenever we reached the campus parking lot.
          I saw it in Andy— poor, long-suffering Andy— for weeks on end as he begged me
to please, please tell him how he could help, and he was met with folded arms and
vacant eyes that hid the shameful spark of resentment I had developed for his
insufferable desire to fix things. Fix us. Fix me. There’s something that dies in a
person— a person willing to do anything— when you tell them there’s nothing that can
be done. It died in Andy the night I canceled on him for roller skating with Becca and Sai
to sit in the shower, and he finally admitted he felt like he was dating a ghost— my
ghost. His sweatshirts were in bags the next morning, and gone from the doorstep by the
afternoon.
          No one likes feeling like there’s nothing they can do about something, and over
time I guess I made it harder to want to try at all. When I ruminate on memories of my
old self, when I mourn her easy laughter and endless optimism, I feel I am the worst
person in the world. When I multiply the grief I feel for the person that I was by the
number of people who loved her, I become the great bereaver, an impostor, and the
victim all at once.
          How to assign blame? I was the only one who could fix me, and I was the only one
who didn’t seem to care— more interested in seeing just how bad things could get.