I have had a pretty good life, I am well put together and have a great relationship with my parents. I am such a good big sister and a great friend. At least, that is what most people would assume by looking at me. Truthfully, my relationship with my parents used to be good, but now I feel like I have to walk on egg shells with them and I know they feel the same. My siblings and I are like any regular siblings, we fight. my friendships, there are very few of them, I used to have a lot of friends but now I only really have one. And I am not in anyway put together. You see the truth is, my life has never been great. My parents haven’t been together since I was 2, I was constantly going back and forth between their homes and my mom and I really struggled for a while. I have always been well provided for and spoiled rotten, I have a really big family so I have never felt unloved. So I am sure you could understand my confusion when I started feeling depressed. I started to notice around the sixth grade that when I was around a lot of people, I felt like the air was thinning and my head started to spin. I wasn’t aware of what anxiety was but I would come to learn later that I had really bad anxiety. I was able to manage it well and I was able to stay active and social. Until around eight grade when I started to lose some interest in my friends and going out to the movies or the mall or the beach. I started to just want tot stay home with my best friend at the time and watch movies and eat junk. I couldn’t understand why this change started to occur and I also couldn’t understand why I was suddenly starting to feel the anxiety come on again, only worse than it had ever been before. When I got into high school it all changed. My freshman year I joined the basketball team which helped me make a lot of new friends and the activity kept my mind off of how bad I noticed my anxiety was getting. But one night I woke up and I couldn’t breathe and I started crying. I didn’t want to wake m mom or brothers up so I went into the bathroom and eventually it got easier to breathe but I couldn’t stop crying. I was crying because while I was in the state of not being able to breathe I had a thought, a thought that I had never had before, I wanted to hurt myself. I was crying because the thought of hurting myself oddly enough, made me feel better. I started to have those thoughts more often and finally I told my mom. We went to a therapist and she diagnosed me. I had an anxiety disorder and suffered from depression. My parents and I didn’t understand how that could be possible because its not like I had a lot to worry about and up until that point my life had always been pretty good. The therapist said that it was no ones fault and that there was no specific reason for this, that it was just the way I was born and my brain was wired. After that, my mom and I kind of drifted apart. She couldn’t handle the fact that there was nothing she could do about the situation and she didn’t like the fact that she couldn’t control it. So we started walking on egg shells around each other. I wish I could tell you that eventually we found our way back together. Eventually yes we did start to get more comfortable around each other, but it was never like it used to be and I really don’t think it ever will be. The depression started to get worse and so did the anxiety, but my therapist and I didn’t click and so I stopped seeing her, and even though we tried to find me a new therapist eventually we just stopped because we got distracted by other things. I ran away the December of my freshman year because I didn’t want to be a burden to anyone. I was found the same day and didn’t get too far but my action made it very clear that my depression wasn’t just something we could put off dealing with anymore. That year was also the year that I started self harming. My sophomore year was pretty much the same thing, I wasn’t on medication and I wasn’t seeing a therapist but I was talking to my school counselor constantly. She kept telling my mom and I that I needed to start seeing someone and my mom always promised to look, but something always ended coming up that would distract her and she would eventually just forget about it all together. The year that really changed things was my junior year. I made it very clear that I needed to see someone, and so I found a psychiatrist myself and went to see him with my mom. I was put on anti depressants and given and anxiety medication that I was only supposed to use when it got out of control bad. I also found myself a therapist that I started seeing and I really liked her. This all happened in October. None of it helped. My family thought it did because I acted like I was getting better, because I didn’t want them to catch on to my plan. That November I started planning my suicide. It would take place January 30th, I don’t know why I picked this date but it just stood out to me for some reason. I would come home from school and go into my room  and I would slit my throat. That same day I was at school and I was adding a few finishing touches to my letters to my family that I had written and someone in my class noticed. When I went to the bathroom my classmate went through my bag and pulled out the letters, having read them he took them to the principal who then called my mom. I was pulled out of class and taken to his office where my letters sat on the desk. In the room was my school counselor, my principal, my mom and a our campus police officer. They asked me what was going on and I told them everything, about my plan. They then decided that the safest thing to do was to send me to an overnight safety center. I went and when the counselor there asked me if I was still planning on killing myself and I said yes she contacted a couple hospitals. The next day I was transferred to a psychiatric hospital in Bakersfield where I would spend the next two weeks under observation. My plan never changed though, and I was very honest about it with the doctors. When they released me to my mom, I told my mom that I was sorry, but that if I got the chance to kill myself, I would. When I got home all the knives were locked away along with my medication. I was never allowed to be alone and was constantly being monitored. I had only been out of the hospital for a couple days when my mom told me that she had secured me a spot at a residential for teens dealing with what I was dealing with, and that I would be going tomorrow. I spent 34 days in the residential and it was life changing. I realized that I wanted to be alive and that I had a chance at being happy. when I was released I was required to go to outpatient therapy which I went to for about a month. I have been out of treatment for about 5 months. No therapy and I have been off my meds for about 3 months and I was doing great. About three weeks ago I started having panic attacks again and I had that thought again, that I wanted to hurt myself. And now its getting worse, everyday I am fighting off a panic attack and I am starting to lose faith. I don’t want to get bad again, but I am afraid that I am, and that there is nothing I can do about it… I am back to where I started.