I warn anyone reading this now, I am extremely verbose and am just contemplating my navel for a good half of this-- read at the risk of your own wasted time. Let me start this from the beginning. From the time I was about eight to around the time I was seventeen, I realize now I was severely depressed. I created a shell around myself and cut off all emotions and all thought—even now, my memories of my childhood are foggy at best and non-existent at worst. During this time, I firmly considered myself to be a cyst on the world. I was a disgusting monstrous ugly thing that was lowering the overall quality of the world simply by existing. No one ever told me that I was but I knew with the same firmness that the sky was blue and that my hair and the sand were both brown. I was not any more bullied than any other child (or in other words, I was teased a bit, but no one ever sought me out to be mean to me). I didn't have a hard family life—we were poorer than dirt but my parents got along alright and my siblings obviously loved me. Nothing was ever particularly wrong with my life. I just simply knew that I was a cyst. No one in my family ever thought to question my emotional unresponsiveness, most likely because it had started so very young and because I never took to self-harm. For many years, the only thing that stopped me from taking my own life (and I assure you, it was never far from my mind—it was always the most logical choice I could make, I felt; always staring at me, waiting, inevitably, for me to choose it—like an old companion waiting behind you with a gentle smile for you to be bored with the current trivialities and to come back to it, as it knew you would), was the feeling that taking my life would be troublesome to the people around me. “Oooh,” I thought, “my parents don't have the money to pay for a funeral. My school would have to have one of those ‘Don't Commit Suicide, Please’ rally things. They would bring in councilors and people I don't even know would go and cry their eyes out saying, ‘She was my friend,’ and ‘she was such a good person.’” (Ha! I am a villain, knave. You did not even know me.) I was under no pretense that it would trouble people that /I/ had died, but I knew logically that people feared death. For someone—anyone—to take their own life would scare most people, simply due to the reminder that yes, death is always close by and always watching, and that every person around you, including you yourself, could die in an instant without warning. I knew, from the bottom of my heart, that people would cry about my death only because they feared the reminder of death, as opposed to true sadness about my, my own person’s, passing. But, of course, these conflicting thoughts only pulled me deeper into my depression—I was a cyst and the world would improve with my death but my death would be a selfish thing to do to the people around me. No matter what I did or did not do, I could only feel more guilt for simply existing. Well, as I said, this continued on until around the time I was seventeen or, more specifically, the summer before my last year of high school. During that time, I ended up losing around thirty pounds of weight due to the simple fact that our kitchen (and the rest of the house to a lesser extent) was un-air-conditioned, meaning that it could easily reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit (or around 54.4 degrees Celsius) in the afternoon. To put it simply, it was too hot to cook or eat. When I went back to school (losing another thirty pounds over the course of the school year), a part of me had been expecting things to be different. That people would look at me differently. But they didn’t. Looking into people’s eyes, I still saw the same hatred that I saw every day for the past nearly ten years. This surprised me, as far as I could feel surprise in such a state, for I had always believed my appearance to be a major part of what made me such a cyst. It was at this point that I had what I like to think of as an existentialist crisis in reverse—suddenly, I realized that my own existence was a meaningless speck in a giant universe and that, over all, my existence was neither good or bad nor was anyone else’s. And within this moment that most people apparently feel crushed with loneliness and worthlessness, I found peace. It did not matter if I lived or died, for I was neither a positive nor a negative on such a grand scale that is the universe. I realized in this moment that I was not a cyst—I was nothing. To most people, such a line would probably not bring them much joy, but you must understand—too me, I went from a negative number to a zero. And suddenly, as I looked around at the eyes of my peers, I realized that I no longer saw hatred in their eyes. I saw pure apathy. I was right, they would not care if I, as a person, ceased to be, in the same way I did not care if they ceased to be. As the years have gone on, I have cradled the knowledge that nothing I did or said truly mattered in the long run for, as Keynes reportedly said, “We're all dead in the long run anyways.” I have since then graduated from my high school and completely lost contact with everyone I ever knew there and found myself friends at my college. At first I found it odd—why did these people seek me out to hang out? It was one thing when I was just a person to talk to while I attended there (I have since transferred to a “nearby” university), but now they invite me over when the chance arises as though they genuinely enjoy my company. I would never tell them this, because I know it would probably upset them, but I still don't understand why they would do such a thing. Why would anyone seek to be around me? If I am neutral, what about me is enough to attract another person? I have always been alright being alone, but now, as the months and years go by, I find myself more and more confused by how much these people seem to care for me and I for them. As emotionally stunted as I am from all of my years of suppressing every emotion, I know that I cannot ever express what they mean to me and what it means to me every time they invite me over to hang out—what it means to me when they drive forty-five minutes to pick me up or what it meant when one of my friends bought a video game for me. That might sound like a strange non sequitur but recently one of my friends surprised me by giving me a video game as a gift and I found myself hugging it and smiling like a loon not because I was excited about the game (I was) but because someone went out of their way and at great expense to give me something they knew I would enjoy. It was a solid physical proof of affection for me—me, as person. Not as an idea of something, but me. And I can never explain to them what they mean to me, what they have done for me. All I can do is bake them cookies and give them the line, “these baked goods are my feelings,” and hope they understand what I mean. I keep hearing professors, counselors, and other students saying things along the lines of how stressed and unhappy everyone is at this time a year (midterms and projects and finals and papers and test, oh my!), but all I can think about is how happy I am. I have been on rock bottom before. I still remember the detached feeling I would have every time I cooked and think to myself, “I could slit my wrist right now and maybe gut myself for good measure… though I should do it outside—I don't want to make a mess.” I still remember the sensation of peace I felt every time I reached under the sink for a bottle of bleach to clean something and think to myself, “I bet I could swig a good half of this before the burning sensation gets to me… I should probably swig it outside though—I don’t want to make a mess with the vomiting.” Compared to this feeling, school stress—or any stress—cannot hurt me. It was only about a year after I started to leave my shell, after I had graduated from high school, that I started to realize just what I was that I had been feeling for, at that point, more than half my life. One day, my elder sister told me that she had been going to a therapist and was currently overcoming depression. She then proceed to tell me that our father had apparently been on antidepressants since I was four and that one of my older brother’s had been caught trying to self-medicate his own depression with our father’s pills. “Depression runs in the family, Kai, so you have to keep an eye on yourself,” she told me. The more I thought about it, the more I was horrified to realize that what I had been feeling for so many years was not just my personality—I was not just an oblivious unemotional individual filled with a sense of self-loathing—there was something medically wrong with me. Something that was dangerous and lethal and for nearly ten years completely undetected. I began feeling like a cyst at the age of eight, completely shutting myself off emotionally, becoming a living china doll with anger-management issues (wild uncontrolled anger for less than a minute about three times a year being my only strong emotion), having constant suicidal thoughts, and /no one noticed that something wasn't right/. The only thing that kept me alive was the fact that my own sense of self-worth was so low that I felt I was not worthy of taking my own life. Forgive me for saying this, but /that’s fucked up/.