Personal Narrative: Take The Challenge

In choosing this topic for my Take the Challenge project, I didn’t realize how much I would experience my topic. I’m Michaela La Vonne Dimick. I am 16 years old, and I have depression. If anyone has looked at a brightly colored image, and then looked at a black-and-white version of that image, then he or she would notice that he or she observes more detail in the black and white photo. Depression is like this. The world changes to grayscale. All I could focus on were the negatives around me. My world went from normal, boring, and happy to bleak, grayscale, and dark. What was wrong with me? My life was perfect both to the outside world and in my mind. I had two parents who loved each other and me, and a sweet, selfless little sister. I had close friends and people who supported me. I was doing well in school and I was healthy. But I had depression. Depression didn’t run in my family, so what was it? This question certainly didn’t help me feel less anxious. In fact, it kept me up at night. …show more content…
No happiness could exist around me. I became more withdrawn from my family and friends, but no one noticed. All I wanted was for people to ask what was wrong, but if anyone did I would usually respond with, “nothing” or “I’m fine.” Looking back now, the depression seems so narcissistic, but then it was so real. I sometimes contemplated suicide, but never got really close to committing it. Even now, when times get tough, that thought is always in the back of my mind. More often I turned to self-harm to cope. Another method I used to cope was creating my own worlds. The worlds I created helped me to avoid thinking about the negatives in the real world. These worlds were almost entirely perfect, but when life spiraled downwards one or two of them would be destroyed. Watching something that I loved dearly being destroyed hurt terribly. In ways, those worlds hindered more than they