Internal

The hallways of my high school are very bright. The floors are composed of always polished, beige marble and the walls are painted in a soothing peach tint. Despite the lack of windows, chains of fluorescent lights held in the ceiling succeed in illuminating everything. During passing period, thousands of teens pushed into the halls, and the noise of chatter became as reverberant and painful as the lighting.
Today, like many days before it, I am both deaf and blind to what is going on. People walk quickly to be the first person in line at lunch or to get to class on time. Occasionally there is a loud excited shout, but I block that out, just as I have learned to block out the light: my head bends over to focus on walking; my eyes squint so that my feet are all I can see. My feet shuffle, bump in to each other, not given the energy to leave the ground. I lack the motivation for movement, again, but I cannot stop moving. That would call attention to myself. I do not want that. I want to get to biology class. But not really.

At the beginning of the year, which lay before my “discovery”, I had loved the class. It was an honors course with lots of students that were just like me; quirky nerds who approved of allusions to Star Wars movies and laughed at math jokes. The teacher was sarcastic and irreverent. He would make fun of any of us at any time but always found a way to teach us something in fifty-minutes. My pre-calculus class seemed impossible to calculate and my English teacher was as harsh as her dyed red hair. Biology began as a nice, mid-morning escape from the harassment of my junior year curriculum.
But somewhere between the lectures on the cardiovascular system and the labs spent dissecting fetal pigs, the class’s appeal vanished. The kids were the same and so was the teacher; they easily laughed at his dumb, dark jokes. But I had changed. I couldn’t laugh anymore. Not just in room 104, but in life. And for the longest time I didn’t know why I had stopped laughing and remained silent throughout the majority of my day. I would sink into obsessive thoughts that I couldn’t let go of, even though they were killing me.
My best friend thought it was just teenage moodiness, arising from a summer break-up she reasoned I couldn’t get over. But that didn’t explain the perseverance of my silence, not to me. No one person could make me mute for weeks on end. I couldn’t tell my friend that though, because I was still struggling to fight my silence. If I could ever get out more than a sentence I would have tried to explain everything to her, if I could figure out what everything was.

As long winter months wracked against the shores of northern Chicago, I painfully dawdled around logical explanations. At first my depression was thoughtful, inquisitive. Why do I feel like nothing I do matters? Well, I would start out, trying to find reason in my own teenage feelings. Learning about clichés in my English class, I realized that knowledge was a dangerous thing. I was simply discovering too many cynical ideas at once. I didn’t really think that learning about evolution alone would make me depressed, but simultaneously learning about the fundamentals of nihilism in AP English made the entire situation inescapable. I was insignificant. One day I would die and that would be it. And I’d be even more alone in death than I was now, because I wouldn’t be able to think these stupid thoughts to myself. Teenagers aren’t supposed to think about death or know anything about it. We’re supposed to feel invincible; ride motorcycles without helmets and make poor decisions. But at the innocent age of sixteen I was already imagining the last day of my life, laying in a bed somewhere, probably unsatisfied because my life had accounted for nothing, and truly meant nothing. I was just one person, a trend in the random mechanism of evolution. I wasn’t important. Hell, I wasn’t even famous. And even if one day I accomplished something, became like Oprah Winfrey on this earth it wouldn’t matter. Death kills everyone. Even epic heroes like Gilgamesh end up dust. At the end of this mental torture sometime in February, I was left with the disturbingly rhythmic playing of one thought on repeat: Where’s the importance of living in a world with no meaning?
In desperation after finding no sufficient answers to flip the switch, my thoughts began to shut down my body. When I walked into biology class that day, I wasn’t functioning anymore. We were assigned to groups to discuss the validity of assigning monetary values to ecosystem resources. I didn’t discuss. I nodded and doodled. My teacher made a grating comment about my sad attempts at drawing. My hand continued to trace lazily on a blank portion of a class handout but my face fell, I raised my shoulders apologetic. “This whole idea sounds dumb,” I whispered, “You can’t say leopards are worth $20,000.” The group continued to talk on this point. I fell into the background again.
Twenty minutes later the bell rang. As I left, in no hurry to get to wherever I was going, my teacher asked me if I was alright. I shook my head, but I didn’t want to tell him anything. Once, in eighth grade, a teacher had asked me if I was alright and I had responded, I thought playfully, saying, “I want to kill myself.” Twenty minutes later I was being driven to the ER by my mother. I wasn’t going to repeat that experience. “Stop by my desk later if you want to talk about it.”
I really didn’t want to. My depression didn’t seem like it could be alleviated by talking about it with a confirmed atheist.
But I wanted attention.
It sounds awful, and selfish, and disgusting.
But that’s all I wanted.
I hadn’t told my parents how I felt because I didn’t want them to worry again (I had been in and out of therapy since I was eight years old). I hadn’t told my friends because I was fearful that my thoughts were more concrete than normal ones, like a virus, that would spread among them, causing a mirror depression, laying waste to the student body.
I hadn’t told anybody, and I didn’t talk to anyone. Every day I had to talk with myself. And nobody wants to talk with a depressed person.
So I went to talk to my atheist science teacher to find out if there was any meaning in this world.
It didn’t start out well. I felt embarrassed crying in front of a teacher. I wasn’t a third grader anymore. I felt disappointed with myself for not knowing how to explain why I was sad even though I had spent thousands of hours figuring it out for myself, glazed over and half-asleep in the past months.
I tried to explain why but it sounded so awful I couldn’t even say it. I just started crying harder. Thankfully my teacher really didn’t care why I was depressed but was more adamant about making sure it stopped.
Two years ago, a girl had committed suicide. I imagined her as a goth, with long black hair and heavy eye make-up. I heard bad things whispered about her afterwards from the girls in my advisory, but I didn’t believe them. I had felt such strong pity that I stood up for her against anyone who questioned her character or her decision. I did so because I knew how easy it is to get that close to doing it. I had never tried, but I had thought about it. It’s so easy to convince yourself that it’s right. “Better to do it intentionally than have death befall you accidentally”, I’d think, before realizing the sentiment’s illogicality.
That girl, of course, had been in his biology class.
I told him I was sorry. He told me he was sorry, too. He had become the teacher liaison for a club on campus called Erika’s Lighthouse which tried to think of ways to deal with teenage depression. It’s a widespread problem that most people don’t talk about. I surely hadn’t wanted to.
He told me he was going to call my parents. I said he shouldn’t, that it was no big deal. I stopped crying just to prove it. No sense in worrying my parents about the feelings I couldn’t even vocalize. I even smiled. I hadn’t done that all day.
I walked around the rest of the day slightly happier. No matter how bad things got, at least I had one reason to continue living. If I killed myself, my biology teacher would no doubt be devastated. I couldn’t imagine doing that to anyone.

At home the next day, my parents sat me down at our lacquered dinner table and asked me if I was okay. I nodded, “I’m fine.” Fine. It was sounded like a plea for further intervention. But I didn’t know how they could help me. “Your teacher called,” my mom said, sounding not too worried, “He said you were upset.” That traitor. “No. I’m okay. It’s just been tough. Pre-calc is really distracting me.” I said, making something up. They nodded. My dad gave me some of his repetitive mini-lectures on the importance of persistence. I walked slowly up the creaky, carpeted steps to my room and sat on my bed after laying my heavy backpack by the closed door, trying to go to sleep. It was only six.
I was called down for dinner. I called back down that I was too tired to walk downstairs. This was partially true, if being tired really was a synonym for lacking motivation to live. I didn’t mind it, living I mean, for the sake of my teacher and my family. But I didn’t enjoy it.
A few minutes later my sister walked up stairs carrying a plate with a slab of steak on it and a side of corn. She had to turn on the lights when she opened my door because I was still laying on my bed in the dark. I hadn’t been sleeping, but I hadn’t been awake. Time had passed while I slowly dwelled on thoughts, moved them around in my head like I’d move this food being presented to me around on its plate. It was utterly useless, I had reasoned in a timeless past, to continue to think. The only problem was I never seemed to be able to stop thinking thoughts. Even in sleep, my dreams forced me to do it.
My sister is shorter than I am, and annoyingly thin, though she still looks like a child even though she’s now in eighth grade.
“Are you alright?”
“No,” I had said it. It should have felt like a monumental achievement. Instead it hung in the room, between us. A few moments passed. I picked up the plate and put it on my lap.
“What’s wrong?” She sounded worried. I missed that, people worrying about me. My lips started to vibrate; I felt my eyes get hot. I took a deep breath. “I can’t explain it,” I said, fearing the mind virus.
“Elora, please cheer up. Mom and Dad are worried about you,” this she whispered.
“Really?”
“Yes. Elora. Really. What’s wrong?”
“I can’t tell you, it’s really depressing.”
“Well you’re depressing me, and I want you to stop.”
“You are so selfish.” I told her.
“Just cheer up because I’m tired of worrying about you.”
I nodded.

Later that night it occurred to me that I alone had no importance. I was drifting in and out of sleep. My thoughts were dreams and vice versa. I could see my life as I had lived it in the past few months and could see it as it one day would be in the future. It seemed feasible. The sound of my little sister’s television blared through our adjoined walls into the darkness of my room, and I realized, that by extension, I had meaning, if only because my happiness made others happy, and my success was tied with the success of others. I was only as alone and useless as I made myself.
No matter the isolation people still found me.

I got a B+ in biology and I turned seventeen. Time passed. I smiled.