Fear: Something that causes feelings of dread or apprehension; something a person is afraid of.

Fear is the cat fur of life. It gets on everything and you have no idea how it even got there. It follows you around like a physical manifestation of your mind. Fear indulges uncharacteristic behavior and not dissimilar from cat fur, rubs off on other people. Living with Depression and Anxiety, I wake up every morning with fear hanging over me like a one night stand that wouldn't leave. My mental state of mind is driven by the swift realization that I have another day to face and the fear that I may not make it to the end of that day. Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote in her book You Learn by Living that "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look at fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." So who am I to argue with an esteemed First Lady who went through more shit than a dysentery patient? My intention in this journey is to find answers not from others, but from within myself and to face my fears.

As a child I was scared of trivial things like werewolves or my parents or getting lost. Now I lie awake at night, terrified of bills, becoming a parent and being lost. I stay up listening to things I never said in my head like a persistent "tink tink" of a car engine cooling down and worry that I will always be this way. I had never considered that I too one day, may find myself with the white picket fence and 2.5 children. How am I to raise a young malleable mind when I had my childhood ripped from me at such an early age? Am I to spend my life vicariously recreating the childhood I never had through theirs? Fear creates a longing for something lost that cannot be recovered (seemingly parallel with my debilitating debt) and pulls you and out of reality with its strings of hopeless expectation. I am extremely lucky to have such an overwhelmingly vast amount of  love and support from those that care about me however I know that is not the case for many others. This is where I would like to extend my help to those in similar situations because just like Mary Schmich wrote in her column for the Chicago tribune (later turned into one of my all time favourite songs Wear Sunscreen), "my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience".

Although I am still working on facing my demons with an affirmed confidence, I believe there is nothing more valuable than listening to others and being forthright with your afflictions. There is no shame in having a mental illness and the stigma around it is only created when people are ill advised on the symptoms of those who suffer.