Atlas

“I'm so nervous, I want to kill myself”, she told me as I passed by.

At first, I thought she was joking. Today, the overused phrase makes me feel sick, sending chills down my spine and coating my throat with ice; however, at the time, it was just a phrase. There was no way it could mean something, because according to me, no one could be that sad. In my naïveté, I thought that there was always a way to forget and to feel better. However, her raincloud was so vast that it consumed her entire world, drowning out even the strongest rays of sun. Her world was dark and empty. She was alone.

I started talking to her, trying to hold back her storm, because my empathic tendencies wanted desperately to help, even though I could not begin to fathom the size of the hurricane that I had willingly placed upon my shoulders. We talked more and more often, and quickly I noticed that she was distancing herself from her friends and family until I soon became her only lifeline, her Atlas. I knew I couldn’t cure her depression, but I would be damned if I didn’t try everything I could to help her. But the suicidal comments became more frequent, and my responses started to sound redundant. I watched as raindrops started falling on my soul, drowning the bright sun over my head. My shoulders were so worn, and I was desperate to let go and to feel the world come crashing down. I started to dread seeing her when I showed up to school, because although I could craft responses over text, face to face, she was hearing my first draft, and it was never good enough. I wasn’t good enough. As a fifteen-year-old without scars from soul-crushing storms, I could not possibly have all the answers to her thousands of questions, and so I came to school crying whenever I would say the wrong thing and she would walk away, leaving me feeling more useless than I have ever felt in my entire life, and worrying for hers.

This is when my friends started to notice a change in me. I became so focused on keeping her alive, that I forgot my friends, my school and my sleep. Her world had crushed mine, and there was not enough left for me to live my own life. I could not see how much this was affecting me. I did not understand that all of my traits that made her open up to me, made me feel her feelings as my own, and thus grew the first cloud to ever live over my head.

I sat on my bed, wondering how the drizzle of rain had turned into a hurricane so fast. I was transported back to a time before everything changed. It was like my mind needed a reminder of who I was as my own person. Who I was before.

My laughter rings throughout the house, I can’t stop giggling. My mom looks at me with affection, her face breaking into a grin.

“You’re just drunk on life, aren’t you?”

My giggles sparkle through the air, singing tunes of warm oranges and shiny yellows. My smile lights up the room, casting a sheet of warmth over my whole body.  I am inherently happy, in love. I am head over heels with the fact that I am alive, and nothing, not even the scariest of storms can turn off my love for the sun.

As much as I loved her, the sweet young girl that was “drunk on life”, she was not a complete person. She was in love with life, but wouldn’t anybody be if their world was made of light? She saw all of the beautiful colours of the world, but had she ever met the darkness? She never knew of the shadows and the storms that would hurt, the ones that would leave marks on her soul, marks that would never truly go away.

Although I could feel the pain of helping her, even though I was crushed by the weight on my shoulders, I could not let go. I could not see that I needed help, that I needed a break, that someone struggling with depression needs an entire support system. One person can’t hold up the world permanently, and so once the talking her down became pulling her away from a bridge as she told me she was going to jump, I made a decision.

On a trip to Washington, DC, at a room-check by my favourite teacher, I told her that I was petrified that my friend might now be a danger to herself. I thought that my friend would hate me; I expected her to never speak to me again after I described all of her dark clouds, her secret storm. But after being rushed to the hospital at two in the morning, she thanked me for saving her life.

A trip to the hospital is not a cure-all for someone so addicted to her sadness, but it was a start. She began to get professional help, to attend school again, to make friends again. Her clouds started to part, she was finally letting through small rays of sun, which lit up her face for the first time in months. Although I was forced to distance myself from her as she was now safe, I will never forget the girl that changed the way I see the world.

She taught me many things about myself as I learned about her. I know now that I am lucky to see the world filled with sunshine because not everyone lives their lives with happiness. I now bear some scars from the storm under my skin, but I learned that it’s ok to have a balance of light and dark in your life, as long as you let the light through as much as you can. I have learned that empathy can be both a gift and a curse and that if helping people is my passion, I need to learn how to understand others’ emotions without feeling them, because a person can not lead someone into the light if they fall into the darkness along the way.