If you haven't met me, welcome. I'm a fifteen-year-old female student at a small school in southeast Illinois. I have struggled with my mental health since I was eleven. My goal is to spread my story and mental health awareness. As I am in recovery, my story is not finished, nor will it end soon. 

Some of the areas I have struggled with regarding my mental health are self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and anxiety. Towards the end of last May it was really hard for me to survive. I felt like it wasn’t possible for me to make it through the rest of my life, the year, the month, the week, or even the day. I always felt like giving up was the easiest escape. There was no true way of coping. Even the self-harm didn’t help enough. I wasn’t as strong as people thought. I pushed through day by day and put on a fake effort. I remember people telling me that strong, kind, and smart. I wasn’t. I really wasn’t. It was all just caked on makeup, a mask. I hid behind this fake person everyday. Everyday when I got home I would slump into a mess. I was really all over the place. I honestly don’t know how people thought I was put together. I was a vase that a kid knocked over and shattered. The accident he was scared to tell his mom about, so rather than telling her as he should’ve and cleaning the mess up. He grabbed some glue, bandaids, and tape. Grabbed the pieces, mixed up the puzzle, the result was simply a jungle. He grabbed the tape and wrapped it together, mommy always told him tape fixes everything. At that point some pieces tumbled in. He grabbed the glue and smothered it all over. Put the bandaids on the cracks to make it feel better. He sat the vase back up, but it wouldn’t hold any more water, put flowers back in praying they’d continue to grow taller. As his mom walked by she didn’t notice, even though the petals were falling. Really she was just a blind bat who went without notice. My cracks were obvious, my bandaids peeling, I’d overflow with a single drop, the slightest knock and I’d be off the tabletop. Then I’ll shatter again. 

In early June the vase of myself shattered again, but this time into even smaller unnoticed shards. This got my vase sent to a workshop to be repaired. They decided to be smarter than that little boy and use hot glue. I can now hold water a little better, my cracks are a bit less noticeable, but my flowers still don’t grow, I still leak, and I’ll forever be cracked. I’ll never be fully fixed, I’ll have to have consistent repairs, and that little boy will have to be super cautious around me. After all, I could shatter at any point. You know, collapse, crumble, and cripple.