Hey Y'all. I suppose I'm just looking for advice and wondering if anyone can relate. Growing up, I always knew exactly what I wanted to do. Not only that, I'd found my passion and I was good at it. So, I spent years all the way through high school training to do what I love better than anyone else. However, during my senior year, I became so depressed that I quit and began to focus only on academics instead of my passion in life. I want to be positive because my family has given me a chance to start again at college and to begin my life after high school. I'm incredibly grateful and I do feel like the luckiest girl in the world.

I am grateful and I try so hard to show it by making good grades and telling everyone how grateful and appreciative I am straight out all the time. But being grateful doesn't stop me from feeling depressed. The last thing I want is for my parents or anyone supporting me to feel that I'm ungrateful or don't appreciate my opportunities/privileges in life. What often bothers me is that no matter how hard I try to seem happy and perfect, I've truly been depressed for a very long time now and it's hard to never act or say how I honestly feel. I hate living a lie, but I do because I love my family more than I could ever want to feel happy myself.

However, when I was in my first year of high school at my personal lowest, though I was horrified at the idea of anyone knowing I wasn't perfect or that I was unhappy, my depression was so terrible that I decided I didn't care anymore. I tried to explain how I was feeling to my father in order to get some help or some comfort. I wanted him to know what to do. But instead, he started to raise his voice and yell at me that I was ungrateful. He started listing out all the things he's done for me as if I had no idea.

I feel that this experience has ruined any chance I had of getting help or being honest about my feeling depressed. At this point, I am starting to really believe that there is no way I can at the same time, be both grateful and appreciative of what I have in life, and also feel just horridly depressed. I don't have any role models or hope that I can dig myself out of this secretive and complicated hole I'm in. But my life feels like a lie. It's already hard enough to gather the courage to be honest...I just want someone to listen to me and not make it about them. Is that too much to ask?