Close your eyes. Take a moment and imagine yourself as a fish in a glass bowl. Alone. Swimming in circles while the world passes by around you.

That’s how it feels.

I became depressed somewhere in my fourteenth year, although now I can barely remember a time when I was on the outside. Its all a bit hazy to me; a photograph that never quite developed correctly, smiles blurred and frozen in time. There’s no way to pinpoint where or when or why, but suddenly I cared so much that I simply stopped caring. I grew up in a town that seemed to close in on me, crushing me under the weight of cookie-cutter suburban families and ski-jump noses. I was a square peg trying to fit in a round hole. And I didn’t notice until then. I had my own personal enlightenment at the age of fourteen, concluding that somehow, I just wasn’t good enough. Everything about me was big, but I felt so small. I sunk into myself, watching, wishing to disappear. As I lost myself, I learned to thrive off others. Constant observation. Analysis. Conclusion. Like writing an English essay. How did they do it? How did they all just know how to be a person? I couldn’t smile with my teeth or flirt with a boy or understand Algebra. Conclusion: something was wrong with me. Rene Descartes once wrote, “I think, therefore I am”, which, looking back, seems to be my real issue. By thinking something was wrong with me, something actually started to be wrong. Every day I put on a show, an actress starring as who I used to be. Trying to pretend that everything was okay was the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. I distanced myself from everyone and wondered why I was so alone. Fourteen is not an age of logicality. But then suddenly I was fifteen. High school. Again at the bottom of the food chain. And the added pressure. Of good grades, of beauty, of boys, of talent. My motto was perfection or nothing, and you can guess where that got me. I didn’t have all A’s, worthless. I was ugly, worthless. No boyfriend, barely any real friends, quiet, shy, insecure. Worthless. But I began to notice. The way the popular boy would stutter when he talked to the girl who he smiled at in the hallway every day. And how my friend would laugh too loud when something was wrong. I was existing in a world of people also in varying degrees of confusion. No one really knew what they were doing either. Slowly I began to feel motivation again. Even if it was just to get out of bed and enjoy the warmth of a steamy shower. Or to catch a couple holding hands under the desk. These things mattered. Maybe I was just background noise, but at least I got to sit back and watch the show. Hopefully one day I’ll work up the courage to join in. It’s still a struggle every day, but I’m trying to learn to live again, rather than just cope. And maybe the reason it was so hard to smile is that I just didn’t have enough practice.