Morgan S.
Photography by David Lee
Please Note: In her letter, Morgan writes about her personal experience with anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. If you think this content may trigger you, we encourage you to take a pause before reading this letter, center yourself, and prepare any resources you may need to access after reading it. If you'd rather not read this letter, we encourage you to read a letter on a different topic. If you’re reading this, we support either choice you make.
If you’re reading this, it’s okay to let people in.
In my head, I’ve written this letter thousands of times. Every time a friend of mine asks me what’s wrong, or comments that I seem down, or even when a stranger asks me something as simple as “What’s your story?” the words to this letter come tumbling into my mouth and stay there, silent. To believe in the message of If You’re Reading This is to know how powerful sharing stories could be, and yet I felt – and still feel – paralyzed at the thought of people knowing my words, knowing me, without a level of careful control in my hands. Words are powerful, but they can be misinterpreted, harmful, or have disastrous effects. It is these effects that I fear.
Throughout my life, talking about my mental health and how my emotions affect me has not often been a choice that has been well-received. Back before I was diagnosed formally with depression and social anxiety disorder, I didn’t really understand how to talk about the things I was feeling in a healthy or constructive way – in the social circles I called home, no one aired out that sort of thing. Self-deprecation, the only outlet I felt I could express at the time, put off some and worried many others. Kids decided they didn’t want to be around me, which I didn’t blame them for – if anything, it contributed to a loop of negative feedback that still looms behind me to this day. I began to associate talking about my mental health with people leaving, and so I started bottling things up to an unhealthy degree. Even after my diagnosis, I convinced myself to open up to my therapist only because I knew she at least was getting paid to listen. It was a struggle I was able to overcome in that context but in not many others.
Starting college, I believed that I was better equipped to handle whatever my brain threw at me: I had consistently attended therapy, was on medication that was working for me, and had helped friends through struggles of their own. But in the spring of my freshman year, I stumbled into a severe decline without a clear origin. I started experiencing intrusive visions of my own death. I didn’t know why they were happening; I didn’t want to die. I couldn’t even be around roads, trains, or high buildings without envisioning it. I felt overwhelmed by a brain that seemed like it was working against me, by my classes, by being far from home, by feeling distant from friends, and so many other things I couldn’t name. Eventually, it was like a switch shut off in me. I would sit in rooms with my friends and just stare at a wall, or feel so out of place that I would go up two floors and sit in a stairwell to cry. The world and everyone in it felt so far away.
After a while, I called a hotline because I recognized that I needed help. The hotline itself didn’t really give me anything concrete to hold onto, but talking to friends of mine did, in different ways. In one case, the person I told wasn’t prepared to receive that sort of information, and our friendship was never really the same after I told them. Even now, I know I could have handled my story better in that instance, which is a fault of mine that has followed me for years now. I had shared something personal about my mental health, and it ended poorly – it was hard not to internalize the correlation, after so many years of doing so. There were days when people asked what happened between us, and it felt as though the words physically could not come out, and had become lodged in my throat somehow. To speak about anything at all felt catastrophic.
However, through the patient persistence of other friends, I began to understand that there were people in my life who would stand by me even after knowing the full caliber of what I was experiencing. I started to realize that friendship wasn’t conditional to how I made someone feel, but rather based on a commitment to mutually support one another through good times and dreary ones. The discomfort that friends might feel at you opening up to them is a normal part of any relationship, and in most instances, the people who care about you would rather experience that discomfort and know your truth than watch you struggle in silence. In many cases, those who you care about might even be having trouble opening up in the same way and could be grappling with things that they want to get off their chest as well.
I still have days where it feels like the words that I need to say refuse to leave my mouth. In my mental health journey, I am far from being ‘better’, and will always have moments where it feels as though the world is too much to bear alone. But I know that there are people out there that will listen, when and where I am ready to talk. I cherish them more than anything and hope I can be there for them in tandem.
And to those still running away from their emotions, to those who fear the social repercussions of people knowing your truth, to those who feel as though they will never be heard, I hear you. I see you. You are so loved, whether you recognize it or not, and there are people out there who want to know you. The whole you – not just your highs, but your lows, and everything in between.
Morgan S., Boston College
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