Personal Narrative-Affordable Student With Mental Illness

Being a well capable student with depression is like looking for a pen when it’s dark. You know you’re capable of finding it, but you’re just so lost that the fight seems hopeless. That is the best way to describe how my high school career has been living with mental illness. Ever since sophomore year, my mental health has affected my attendance and grades. I was first taken out of school by my depression in January of 2017 for a partial hospitalization to help my mental health. I was out for two weeks, which put me far behind in classes. Working against my depression took immense effort, which didn’t translate well into my grades, but eventually picked them up for the better, as I grew more able to cope with stress. However, this would prove to be tough again in my Junior year.

I missed lots of school at a time, and had to drop many classes in order to save my GPA. This decision (which, might I add, was the hardest in my teenage life) to continue public schooling after all of this was imminent: I had to do it, to prove to myself that I could. And as the year went on, I began to prove to myself and my adult influences that I was stronger than the mental illnesses that had proven time and time again that they controlled my education. I worked hard to focus and catch up, staying up late to make up work that I missed, copying pages upon pages of notes, just to try and scrape by classes because I didn’t believe I could do much better than that. But, alas, I was able to break through the barriers my mind had set and with my hard work, pass all my classes. My mental health still affected everything I did, but I managed to fight it well enough to work through it and focus on my