Dear mental illness,

Whatever your name may be…clinical depression, schizophrenia, agoraphobia, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder etc, your name is simply not limited to one particular label. You are an evil creature who creeps upon the purest of souls, the ones who mean nothing but the best in their life. Sometimes, your evilness appears in the form of a human, who hurts somebody and tortures them so much to the point where you appear inside their heads. Other times, for the more complex situations, you appear in the mind of someone who has everything going for them. We ask you, mental illness, why us? Why did you choose us? Out of the seven billion people in the world – the cruel ones, the ones who have no decency for other human beings – why did you pick the ones who are doing whatever they can to get through the day? You made us hate ourselves, at a time where we thought it wasn’t possible to hate ourselves even more. You made us question our values, our morals, were we defined by you? Absolutely not, but you made us believe we were. We battled with you for years, sometimes even decades, having endless arguments with you in our own heads, trying to beat the temptation of touching something until it felt right, or trying to combat the fear of loneliness, or the feeling that we were bad people on the inside and that we would one day harm ourselves, or even worse, others. You made us feel like we were worthless. Sometimes you even won. Congratulations. You made someone feel so worthless that they decided there was another place better suited for them. You took away the greatest gift they would ever receive – their life. You tormented them so much to the point where they could no longer handle it. They were the unfortunate ones. They were the victims. We are the fighters. We are the ones who continue to battle with you each day. We get treatment and you persuade us into thinking it’s not working just because you have a stronger power over us. We need to understand that until we receive the upper hand you will always win. But the upper hand is so close – yet so far – and the tunnel is so dark – yet we can still see the light – and our hands are trembling – yet we still feel strong on our feet – and every waking moment of ours is telling us we would rather spend our days lying in bed and sleeping away our problems – yet our nightmares are even worse. You have this attachment towards us where you can’t seem to let us go. You think we’re vulnerable, maybe we are. But being vulnerable does not mean being weak. We didn’t let you inside us, we’re only human. You just found a hole and peeked your way through, each moment of vulnerability enlarging you until you found a comfortable place in our minds. If we could see you we would punch you, we would knock you to the ground and burn you to pieces – yet at the same time we would feel sorry for you. Because of the people that we are, because of our caring souls, because we see you as a living thing, a part of us, because you made us believe that you were a part of us. But this is not true. You are not a part of us. You are an unwanted guest in our home known as our minds. You are an intruder to our comfort zones. To some, you’re just a passerby, those are the lucky ones. But for the ones, like myself, who are not so lucky, we want you to know that we will beat you. No matter how long it takes. You are not welcome inside our minds, inside our souls, inside our hearts. You may have consumed our thoughts, but you will not consume our bodies. You can keep trying your hardest, in fact we encourage you to do so, but just so you know, I will win.

I will wake up in the morning, and I will fight.

I will drag myself out of bed if I have to.

I will take a shower.

I will clean myself.

I will eat.

I will extinguish the thoughts.

I will destroy the temptations.

And most importantly, I will destroy you.

With nothing but hate,

Yours sincerely,

A fighter.