Undergraduate / UC Application- Overcoming OCD and Depression [5]

Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud, and how does it relate to the person you are?

I suffered from clinical depression. The most terrifying part of depression is facing people, which unfortunately for me was a requirement to pass my English class.

My English teacher said that people who worried about the upcoming and stress-inducing Individual Oral Presentations were really inherently self-centered. "What do you have to be afraid of?" He smiled in a way that conveyed you-over-achieving-kids-need-to-chill-out. I remember standing in front the smartest students in my grade. I felt like I was about to fall through the vomit-colored floor. I closed my eyes and mouthed all my memorized lines before beginning like a silent prayer.

Someone held in a laugh, "You can start now." It's a familiar tone I noticed from people when the see me walking in to every threshold with my left foot or touching every corner of a bathroom mirror before I leave the room.

So then I started, reluctantly. I could feel every word drowning in my throat, clawing to breath out. I stopped. It was suddenly too much. There's this part in "A Sorrowful Woman", where the protagonist is stuck in a white room. It was suppose to symbolize the cold isolation she felt like the sterility of white hospital rooms. That's what happened in my head. A white blank, like a hospital room.

My teacher nods like he understands and very calmly he says, "You're breathing too fast. Are you having a panic attack?"
And I don't say anything. I run to the bathroom and cry. I touch every corner of every mirrors and repeat the lines of my presentation that I couldn't finish in class. I wait till class is over and I walk back into English.

I remember my English teacher telling me that if anything was bothering me I could ask for help if I needed it. So I did. My favorite part of a novel is when the protagonist reaches an epiphany like Melinda in Laurie Halse Anderson's novel "Speak" when she finally has the courage to speak the truth and ask for help after living inside her head. Like Melinda, I was one of the lucky ones that could find a way back to normalcy. Some people believe depression is a flaw in character. It isn't. It's actually a flaw in chemistry that could be fixed with medication. I want to say that I'm proud of overcoming depression. That's what my friends, my teachers, my parents, and everyone important in my life says that I should be. The thing about achievements is that they don't mean anything unless you know what failure is. My failures are just a big a part of me as my achievements. The person that I am is continually growing, I want to write stories and touch people's hearts and relate to them. In my opinion, the best part of a story is the real agony the protagonist or the narrator experiences. Because no matter how depressing and negative someone's pain is, it is real.