I was never going to write on here. I was going to comment and offer support… but I was never going to write about how I felt.

“It’ll go away later,” I’d tell myself. “There worse things out there in life than feeling down every now and then.” “Everyone gets overwhelmed this time of year.”

But then I wonder if it’s worse than that.

I’ve always been relatively smart. My elementary school wanted me to advance to 2nd grade during Kindergarten. I was in Beta Club and always enjoyed school. Then, in the 3rd grade, my parents split up. I vaguely remember an incident where my dad hit my mom. They got back together when I was in 6th grade. But, things weren’t going well.

We moved after 6th grade. My best friend had moved away a year earlier and I had a hard time making new friends in my new town.

I was smart… and smart kids aren’t the cool kids.

So, I dumbed myself down.

Things weren’t good at home, either. My parents were not happy and it showed. My mom had a meeting with my teacher’s my sophomore year of high school to discuss my poor grades and my English teacher told her it was because I was bored with school. It was too easy for me, and I had given up.

I had driven myself to the point that I actually told my mother that I wanted to kill myself.

To this day I can not guarantee that it was an empty threat.

After we moved, everything about me changed. I became my mother… she gets upset too easily. She’s depressed. As far as I know, she’s not gotten help for it and she’s always telling me to stop getting “into tizzies.”

I’ve been in some bad relationships where I was used and cheated on and emotionally abused. I was called a “butterface” (everything is okay about her, but her face), ugly, and fat. I think the worst thing people made fun of me for was my nose. It’s on the larger side and now every time I look at myself in the mirror all I see is that damn nose.

How it makes me far from perfect.

I’m engaged now and I love my fiance with all of my heart and I know he loves me, too…but there’s this voice that comes out every now and then and eats away at me.

That voice says that he deserves someone beautiful and he’s going to find her and leave me. My self-esteem is not great.

I trust that he loves me and won’t leave me… but that voice in my head won’t shut up.

The best way to describe how I feel is when you go to a store like Best Buy. If you go to the back of the store where all the TVs are, and you put each TV on a different channel and close your eyes. All those voices, all the things running through your mind – and I can’t make it stop.

My self-esteem is so very low. I can’t even make simple decisions like what I want to eat for dinner. If I go to make a speech or presentation in class, I get so shaky I can barely stand up, let alone speak. In some classes I can’t understand the material, so I cry.

When Tony asks me what I don’t understand so he can help, all I can muster is, “I just don’t understand.”

What’s the most important thing I don’t understand?

Why I went from a smart, outgoing kid to someone who wants to hide in their room with the lights off.

And, then there are days when I feel great and nothing is wrong and I just say to myself, “it went away like usual. See? Everything is better. Sometimes people just get sad.”

Until that voice in the back of my head finds those remotes again.