I stand in the middle of the union, not hungry but forcing myself to eat anyway. I swallow against the lump in my throat, the one that always rises at the thought of eating when I am not hungry, and spin a slow circle. My stomach twists at the thought of any food inside of it, the way it always does, but I know I have to eat and so I am forced to make this choice. I walk a slow lap around the room, trying to find anything that even sounds remotely appetizing. I finally settle on Chinese after five minutes of deliberation, and order the same thing I always get. I order two meats even though I know I will not eat all of them both because the thought of picking only one is too much effort for my tired brain. I eat maybe half before throwing the rest away, too sick of food to even consider carrying it.

 

Shannon’s Daily Schedule

 

• Wake up at nine in the morning to a happy alarm that is supposed to make her want to get out of bed. It won’t.

• Snooze the alarm every five minutes for an hour. Her phone will only allow three snoozes before she has to end the alarm. She has perfected unlocking her phone and changing the alarm time over and over again without ever really waking up, pushing the time further back to delay the inevitable.

• Wake up for real. If she’s lucky, she will be able to roll out of bed and stumble directly into the bathroom. If she is not lucky, she will lay in bed and contemplate the ceiling and how much she hates herself and the day ahead of her. If she is very unlucky, the first tears of the day will fall.

• Shower. This will take her half an hour because she will spend at least twenty minutes of her time sitting on the floor of the shower and letting the scalding water turn her tan skin a dark red. She will imagine this color is her real color, a hidden fury at her life. She won’t feel the fury. She won’t feel much of anything, other than the bone deep cold that made her turn the water up in the first place.

• Get dressed. This may take five to twenty minutes. If she has done laundry recently, her favorite dresses will be clean and she will pick one of those. If she has not, she will throw item after item to the floor, trying to find something she doesn’t hate too much that day. Her sneakers will probably be in the living room where she kicked them off the night before. If she is in a hurry, she will wear yesterday’s socks again.

• Catch the bus after the one she should have been on and arrive to class late. She will be embarrassed about her habitual tardiness and promise herself that she will get up earlier the next day. She will not.

• Try to care about the classes that will become her future. She wants to care. Somewhere deep inside of her, she will carry today’s guilt in a pouch that grows bigger every day, filled with marbles labeled for every responsibility or pleasure she’s ruined for herself.

• Go home as soon as possible. She’ll immediately go to her room and lay in bed for at least a few minutes. On a good day, she might skip the bed and go straight to the living room. Those days are very rare and usually coincide with her being alone in the apartment. She’ll probably read something on her phone, hopefully something good.

• Make dinner for the entire apartment, as is her job. Some nights it’s legitimate dinner, with a meat and a vegetable and a starch. Most nights it’s a pasta or rice dish. On bad nights, it’s something from the freezer, a frozen pizza or some chicken nuggets.

• Lay on the living room rug or in her big chair, sometimes laughing with her roommates and sometimes ignoring everything around her. If her homework is easy, she will play video games, screaming at pixels on a screen with far more passion than she feels. She will overreact because she worries that the emotions she feels aren’t real enough, strong enough to count.

• At one or two in the morning, she will set her alarm reluctantly and curl up to sleep. If she is lucky, she will be asleep in five minutes. If she is not lucky, she will listen to the whole hour long podcast and have to select another. She cannot sleep in silence.

 

      Repeat as necessary until jokes about throwing myself off the roof of the nearest building stop being quite so much of a joke. I know I won’t, but the thought will comfort me until my medicine kicks in again.

 

      My junior year of high school marks the beginning of my fall. I am taking thirteen credit hours through the local university. I am taking seven high school classes. I am photographer and designer of the yearbook. I am basketball captain. I am the unofficial class secretary. I am drowning.

 

      Sleep comes with a struggle, though I fall into bed exhausted. I am awake until two or three or four, feeling my muscles tighten and ache and my eyes burn. I stop eating as much, some nights having two of three bites of food if I can and some nights skipping dinner altogether. I become snappy at anyone who speaks to me and I sleep through almost all of my classes. It builds and it builds in my chest until it rips me open and pours out all over my floor.

 

      The worst night of my life begins normally. It is a school night, a Wednesday to be precise. I go to bed early because I have a basketball game the next day, but I do not sleep. My father has turned the internet off because he thinks I am playing sick to stay up late reading fanfiction. My mother thinks I am tricking my body into believing it is not tired. It is ten in the evening when I drag myself to bed. Then it is eleven. Midnight. At two in the morning, I give up on my too-warm bed and drag my blanket and pillows over to my closet. I prop myself up against the bookshelf and set my iPod next to me for music. Time continues to pass. It is three, then four, then five, and the only marks of time passing are the changes in songs and the shift of my position.

 

      At six thirty, my mom opens my door quietly, expecting to find me sleeping peacefully. She looks around when she sees my bed stripped and empty and meets my eyes. I smile and her eyes widen. How insane did I look, I wonder? Could she tell that my grip on reality was starting to slip, that I was so tired I couldn’t tell what was real?

               

      “Good morning, mom,” I whisper, with a smile.

               

      “Did you sleep, honey?

 

      I slowly shake my head, then pause. “Maybe, I dunno. I can’t remember the whole night.”

 

      She tries to send me to school anyway, even though my hands shake as I button my chapel shirt and my eyes are bloodshot in the mirror. I hit my neighbor’s car trying to back out of the driveway and burst into hysterical tears.

 

      My mother lets me stay home.

 

      My doctor doesn’t believe something is really wrong, and she tells my mother as much.

 

      “She probably just needs somebody to talk to,” she tells my mother, as though I’m not sitting before her, as though I can’t hear her. “Teenagers are like that, you know. Maybe a therapist.”

 

      My mother crosses her arms and leans back. “We talk just fine. Something is wrong with my daughter.”

 

      The doctor looks to me, to my mother, and sighs. “We’ll order some blood tests.”

 

      My mother takes me immediately. I haven’t eaten anyway, so fasting blood tests aren’t a problem.

 

      A few days later, my mom gets a call. Turns out I have a vitamin deficiency. The doctor is surprised. According to her, another week and I would have needed a hospital. Instead, I get a handful of pills and an order for more blood tests within the month. My dad comes to my lunch hour that afternoon with a doctor’s note and a bag full of pills. The calcium chews taste like rotten Tootsie-rolls, fake chocolate left to rot in the sun, but I devour them like I haven’t eaten in weeks. I’ll deal with anything to get better. I finally have a name for whatever is wrong with me. I have a solution. Soon I’ll be normal again. My friends think it funny. Katie eats the chews with me because she likes the chocolate taste.

 

      After three days on the medicine, I come home on a Friday and sleep from eight that night until six the next evening. I eat three hamburgers and a plate of fries and I feel better, for a while.

 

      I take the pills on and off for two years, but they only treat a symptom of a real problem. I turn eighteen in the interim. I switch doctors. I ask my mother to leave the room while I talk to my doctor. I don’t want my mom to know some things. I ask if sexually active only applies to partners. I tell her that I hookah sometimes, only a few a year. I tell her I smoke, but that I smoke the zero milligram oils so it’s just water vapor. I tell her about not wanting to be alive, about waking up to the crushing knowledge that I will have to live through yet another day.

 

      My new doctor orders fresh blood tests. We talk for a while, and she eventually gives me a new diagnosis, a hormone imbalance. She prescribes me low-estrogen birth control, a green plastic cover for three months of pills. That little green package costs $230 without insurance, and I am absurdly glad that my parents’ insurance covers me as I grip the pills in my shaky hands. This is it, for real this time. The hormones will make me feel better. This is going to fix everything.

    

      One month, two months, three months, one pack gone and I am sleeping again, am waking up feeling alive, and it’s the best feeling in the world.

               

      Two packs later, I return for a checkup.

 

      “How’re you feeling?” she asks me.

 

      “Fine,” I reply, fidgeting with my skirt. She waits, quietly, for me to speak.

 

      “I feel… okay. I mean, I have days where I don’t want to be alive, sure, but,” I pause, my eyes roaming the room. I focus on the art on the walls, not wanting to meet my doctor’s kind eyes. “That’s normal, right? Everyone has those days.” Am I convincing her or am I convincing myself? Maybe if I say it enough, it will be true. I am normal. Wanting to stop existing is normal. I’m not suicidal. I just want it to happen. But that’s okay, that’s normal. I want to believe that. I need to believe that.

 

      I swallow past the dryness in my throat, fumbling for the water bottle on the floor next to me. “I can be happy. Most days.”

 

      My doctor diagnoses me again, this time with dysphoria.

 

      Dysphoria is like depression, but milder, she explains. The hot sauce with the smiley face on the bottle, rather than the face crying tears. I considered myself lucky and left it at that. I could have needed more medication, but my doctor thought I would be fine. Third time’s the charm.

 

      “Her depression motivates her,” my mother tells my grandfather that night, and I bite my tongue to avoid screaming from my spot on the couch. Is that what she calls it? Motivation? When I lay in bed, the weight of a normal day threatening to pull me apart, I am not motivated. When I sit on the floor of the shower and sob, scratching my neck raw because the wet hair against my skin feels like fingers, I am not motivated. When I sit in front of my computer at four in the morning, fighting the desire to throw my hands up and scream, I am not motivated. What little motivation I do feel comes from my determination to be better than my disease.

 

      Dysphoria, not depression. I have the mild hot sauce. When I complain about my medium wings, my brother shoves his own hot-smothered wings in my face and tells me I am just being a whiner. Perhaps this is the same. Maybe I am just weak. I slump further into the couch, doing my best to block out the conversation from the kitchen. When my mom calls me into the kitchen, I smile and walk in as though I had never heard a word she said. Fighting with my mother never gets my anywhere, after all. Dysphoria, not depression. Weakness.

 

Shannon's List of Things to Live For

 

• Her cat, who will only purr when Shannon pets her and who looks for her owner whenever said owner calls and is put on speakerphone.

• The new Harry Potter movie, which will feature America and Hufflepuffs in one motion. She is a Ravenclaw, but she sympathizes with being pushed out of the limelight by Gryffindor and Slytherin and is proud of Hufflepuff house.

• Her friends, who have never tried to tell her to just cheer up on those days where she is being suffocated by the world. She calls them her family by choice and would do anything for them.

• The feeling of sun on her skin when the wind is cool, when it whips her curls around her face and reminds her of Pocahontas standing on that cliff ledge in the moment before she dives. She will lift her chin to the sky and think of her mother singing “Colors of the Wind” and it will lift the weight, just for a moment.

• Seeing Big Ben one day, because she always swore she would get out of her boring, empty town and where better than somewhere exotic, somewhere that holds more memories of childhood than many places in her home town? She grew up alongside Harry and will hold him close to her heart.

• Knowing how Kingdom Hearts ends, because she has poured two years into this series now. She has fallen in love with the characters and Disney and the worlds and she spends hours at a time theorizing or reading about the characters or just thinking about them. Not knowing their ending feels like not knowing her own.

• Walking in the rain, when her eyelashes stick together and her curly hair becomes wavy and such a dark brown it may well be black. The world is cleaned by dirty water from the sky, and maybe she can be too, if she stands there long enough.

• Platonic cuddles during horror games, the kind where she is overheating and sweating but unwilling to let go because this is human contact, this is love in a strangely pure form that she craves in the way her body used to crave salt after a hard softball game, in the way that means she needs it to survive.

 

      I will think about this list every time the pressure on my chest becomes too great to bear, pushing down on my chest until I imagine my ribs crack, pressing against the muscled walls of my heart. I wonder if piercing it will cause the happiness I miss to flow into my chest.

 

      Most days I’m alright. It’s a balancing act I’ve perfected, toeing the line like I used to toe a balance beam, and after that the curb between grass and open air. Not too far left, not too far right, always right down the middle for me. I can’t allow myself to lose the reality of my feelings in the lie, but I’m not allowed to wallow in those feelings either. I exist as a blend, the darkness and the light, fighting to keep my balance as life buffets me from all sides. A violin bow, positioned perfectly to only glide across a single string, a note ringing through an empty room. The string might not be tuned quite right, but it still plays music, still accomplishes its purpose.

 

      If I ignore the festering hole in my chest, the dull ache of nothing when there should be something, then I can pretend at being alright. I can ignore the sucking black hole, ignore the way it slowly collapses, consuming everything around it until there is nothing left of me but the lie, the game I play. I’m not supposed to feel this way, not supposed to feel so strongly that I don’t want to be awake, don’t want to be human. I’m supposed to have the milder form. My label says it’s mild, but it doesn’t feel mild when the taste in my mouth burns my tongue and makes my stomach roll and my chest ache.

 

      Dysphoria, not depression.

 

      I remind myself of this as I stare up at my ceiling, wondering why I turned my doctor’s offer of medication down. I don’t need medication for my depression because I don’t have depression. Dysphoria, not depression. I don’t want more pills; hell, I don’t want any pills. I don’t want to have my alarm going off at ten every night, a cheerful song to remind me to go swallow my medication. One multivitamin, one calcium, one vitamin D, one birth control pill.

 

      I will skip the vitamins. They make me feel like an old woman, shuffling through her medicine cabinet for the handful of pills she needs to get through her day. I’m only twenty-one years old, I want to scream. I don’t want this. I don’t want to have to face my professor and explain that I missed class because I can’t sleep, because the idea of getting out of bed that morning made me cry into my pillow until I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I shouldn’t be feeling this. This is what depression is. This extreme, this all or nothing emotion is depression, not dysphoria.

 

      Some days I fall. Some days I am pushed and some days I am just so tired, so damn tired of this act and I just let go, let myself fall. I choose to skip my medication, daring the world to mess with me. You’d think I’d know now not to tempt the universe. For those first few days, I feel amazing. No medication, no sickness, I feel normal. If I’m lucky, I might make it a whole week without the pills, without that tiny green package. Take that, world. I’m stronger than you thought.

 

      I can do this, I say to myself as I drag my way across campus. I can do this, I think as I sit at my desk at four in the morning, my eyes burning from the white light of my laptop. I can do this, I repeat, the breeze blowing my hair and reminding me that I’m allowed to be happy.

 

      I can’t do this, it whispers, the warmth and comfort of my bed taunting me from a few feet away. I can’t do this, it snarls as I take another pill, smile another smile. I can’t do this, it says, and I believe it.

 

Shannon’s List of Ways to Know She’s Not Okay

 

• Locking herself in her room in the middle of the day. If all the lights are off, do not assume she is sleeping, because she is probably not. She is probably laying on her back in her blue-green bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering why she feels like she doesn’t exist.

• Avoiding eye contact. She’ll look at your nose, your ear, your hairline, anything to avoid direct eye contact. She’s always heard that the eyes are the window to the soul, and she wonders if there’s anything to see in her deep, dead browns anymore.

• Unusually quiet. She’ll miss her name, miss conversations, like she’s sleeping with her eyes open. Her movements will be listless and dull, but if you say anything to her, she’ll force them twice as hard. Try to include her anyway.

• Carrying her plushie around. She’ll curl up in the living room with three different plushies on her chest, holding them like a lifeline. One will accompany her to the kitchen when she cooks, and she will cling to it while she stares unseeingly at the pan on the stove. She will talk about it like it’s a person, and maybe for her it is.

• Eating more or less than usual. Less is hard to determine, since she already eats so little, but pay attention. She’ll poke at the dish, trying to force just one more bite down her throat, or she’ll eat anything in sight. Chips, salad, fruit popsicles, chocolate. If it’s food, she’ll eat it, and hate herself for it after.

• Not wearing a dress or skirt. She always wears a skirt. She owns two pairs of jeans and one pair of shorts. If she’s covering her legs, it means she tried to gather the strength to shave and couldn’t do it. She won’t want you to know.

• Ponytail hair. A ponytail means she didn’t shower, because her hair only cooperates when it’s been allowed to dry from wet. If she woke up and did not shower, then her hair will be a mess, and she will pull it up to hide that fact.

 

If signs persist, check my medicine. Count back how many days I’ve missed, how long I’ve gone pretending I’m stronger than my body, stronger than this disease. Make me take it. Two a day, three a day, nausea coiling in my stomach as I force myself to keep the pills down.

 

When I catch up, I’ll be better. I won’t let this beat me.

 

Tonight, I will do what I do every night. I will play a game, read a book, pass the time. I will lay in my bed in the dark until my eyes burn from the light of my phone. I will plug my phone in next to my head, I will turn on some noise, and I will set my alarm for 9:30am. And when my alarm goes off in the morning, I will crawl out of bed and I will face the day.