This is an essay I had to write for a scholarship on the biggest challenge I have ever faced.
The greatest challenge I have ever faced was battling depression. Beginning my seventh grade year I started having self-esteem and body image issues. By my freshman year I began struggling with self-harm. During my late sophomore year I was diagnosed with anorexia. Each one of these challenges brought along its own struggle.
When I first began to have self-esteem issues I remember looking at pictures in magazines and crying. I remember crying because all of my friends were skinnier than I was. Then I began getting bullied because of how I dressed and the music I liked listening to. I constantly told myself that it would get better in high school and I couldn’t wait until middle school was over.
By the time I was a freshman, nothing had changed. I still cried over my body, and got bullied; only this time, the bullies were the people I thought were my friends. I would always think I was doing something wrong. I thought I was the problem. This led me into some negative decision making. I started changing everything about who I was almost every two weeks. I kept changing until I could please someone, not once stopping to think if I was pleasing myself. I felt such an intense pain inside that the only way I thought to make it stop was to turn to self-harm. I didn’t realize at the time just how bad that would affect my future.
Sophomore year rolls around and I have finally found who I thought I was but I still wasn’t happy. I still wanted to change more about myself. I thought that since I found a group of people who I could fit in with and that would be pleased with me, I would be happy. This was when I came to the conclusion that nobody could ever truly be happy and successful. I thought it was a choice between the two with no gray area. Of course I was stuck on pleasing everyone else, so I chose to be successful, but success cannot come if you are not able to work for it, and I just didn’t have the strength. I gave up on everything. I stopped coming to school, stopped seeing my friends, lost my job, stopped dancing, stopped eating, and stopped spending any time at all with my family. All I did was sleep. Every night I went to bed and wished so hard that I would never wake up again, when I did, I immediately turned to self-harm to make the pain go away.
At this point I have reached my junior year. October 5th 2013, my mom and dad found out about me self-harming and immediately had me in therapy. I wasn’t getting better because I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to because I was scared of what lay ahead. January 22nd 2014 I was baker acted for a suicide attempt. This is where things made a change. Things had to get so bad that I finally decided it was time to get better. I started trying harder in therapy and trying to go to school. Most days getting out of bed seemed impossible. I started forcing myself to do it, and eventually it became easier. This is where I noticed that I had made an accomplishment. When someone can get out of bed and function on a daily basis even though they don’t even want to be alive, they should get credit because that is so hard to do.
As of today, my eighteenth birthday has just passed, and I have gone almost three months without self-harm. I look back to where I was one year ago I can see so much improvement. I am happy to wake up every day and I give myself things to be thankful for. I am always with a friend, and I enjoy spending time with my family. I overcame the huge challenge of going from not wanting to be alive and giving up on everything, to being happy and thankful for simply being alive. I plan to become an adolescent therapist so that I can have the chance help others through these same challenges.
Wow. I like bands. 