Gaia B. Amman

Depression is a physical illness, like bleeding from a wound that won__ close. You cannot fix it, it doesn__ heal.

Why did it have to be such a shameful secret? Hadn__ I been potty-trained and taught to chew with my mouth closed? So what was the freaking big deal about having sex? Wasn__ it essential to the survival of our darn, hypocritical species?

Everything seemed less frightening with music, even more so with music I knew by heart. It forced a familiar perspective on the scary unknown that was about to happen.

Life goes on, whether you like it or not. I just wished it could lurch forward. Time is the best doctor, they say, and that__ bullshit, because from certain pains you can never heal. They keep screaming inside of you till eventually you get used to the noise and can hear again the life outside, but they are always there, aching, clawing at your soul.

Maybe beauty had nothing to do with the garbage TV tried to sell us. It was more a matter of confidence. Either way, I had none.

Maybe that was what being together with someone really meant. It meant seeing past the idealization you had of them, embracing their flaws and fears, helping them to overcome them, waiting for them if they were not ready. Maybe being in love didn__ mean finding the perfect person, it meant it was worth sticking with an imperfect one.

Yes, I was scared, vulnerable, and fragile and lived in books more than real life. Yet there was nothing Mom could do to make things easier for me, just worse by grounding me for life at the slightest hint of truth. Why? Because in spite of what she said she did not trust me or, to put it in her words, I did not know what was good for me.Being a teenager sucks! I might as well have been in prison.

There is nothing harder than telling your own mother youâ__re everything she hoped you were not.

Why did it have to be such a shameful secret? Hadnâ__t I been potty-trained and taught to chew with my mouth closed? So what was the freaking big deal about having sex? Wasnâ__t it essential to the survival of our darn, hypocritical species?

Sometimes, when you want to help a broken person, your attempts only remind them of their missing pieces.