Hello people of Chavez or just the internet, recently our school had a PLUS panel and I don’t think the mental health portion of it was focused on as much as it could’ve been by the panelists. The subject was heavy and many of Chavez’ own students came out to message the panel of the emotions they were feeling in these depressing times of staying at home. There’s millions of reasons why all people in general will start feeling “depressed” but it’s just taking so much toll with limited means of escaping the feeling because of COVID. I’m going to share my experience with therapy and when I told myself that I couldn’t handle my emotions by myself anymore. 

I started therapy in March of 2019, it took a lot of courage to gut up and approach my mom on wanting to be in therapy because of the intense feelings of lack of motivation, no confidence, and a negative environment in general. Talking to someone I could actually trust and get the right feedback from was an absolutely amazing thing to have. Before, I’ve never really had anyone to share my emotions with it and understand how I truly feel, but now I’m okay with it because I learned the nature of my emotions and there’s really no one else in the world that will know how to make me, well me. I told myself it was time to get some help because there were too many times I thought of harming myself and times I did. Times I just could not get up to do anything but soak in the sadness and negativity of my mind. I always thought I only needed ME to take care of myself, but that was far from true.. I could tell my therapist all my deepest darkest secrets and he’d just say, “That’s cool, but guess what..” and would proceed to 1-Up me which was a fun experience. We’d tread lightly on the depression talk and he’d give me some really useful advice and I loved that. The only reason your therapist would contact your guardian is because you have intent to harm yourself or someone else. 

I was diagnosed with moderate to severe depression, moderate to severe anxiety, and severe PTSD. To this day, I still have improvement to work on these things and I’m happy to. Being sad, it’s going to happen. It’s only being human. To me, the most important thing that helped with my depression was a positive environment. If you’ve talked to me even once, I give you all the energy and enthusiasm in the world because I would not want anyone to feel the sadness of abuse I felt. Some of the things I did to help my emotions was write music, dissect music pieces, workout, cook, and just be positive. There’s little things out there that can make your whole week or even change your whole life. You HAVE TO learn to love yourself and find the beauty in the person you are. There’s going to be people that hate and love you. Learn what YOU ARE good at. Learn about WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY. 

Working out for me was an escape from time and death because time passes by at an incredible pace when you workout. Writing music was something I could pour my emotions into and make it sound beautiful. Cooking helped with eating too much because eating out all the time has so many artificial chemicals. My room and my whole personality is my positive environment. I have things in my room to remind of my pain because although it was horrible time in my life, I’ve ultimately come to peace with it. Creating peace with a lot of the anger and despair I felt just made me feel better.

 This biggest takes I can summarize on my experience is to really find someone you can trust with your life and that makes you feel happy. Not happy for the moment, for your life. To love yourself and find what you’re good at so you can excel and be happy and proud of your progress at your own pace. Be comfortable with yourself, listen to whatever music you want, love who you love, dress how you want to, change your life into how you want it to function. Live your life to the absolute fullest. And lastly, find peace in the life that you’ve experienced and be as happy as you can make yourself. Because no one else will.