CoffeeTattoos

I absolutely love this post. I’m amazed that someone five years younger than me could write something like this. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing by any means. I guess I just didn’t expect something like it because I’d never seen something similar before.

I have never really understood why we as humans find the need to label each other, as if names weren’t enough. No, we have to describe and attempt to define every individual we meet.

Personally, I can be defined as a sister, a daughter, a friend, a writer, an advocate. Maybe some would define me as a poet or an artist. But then there are other who would define me using the term “mentally ill.”

For years, I have loathed that term. Mental illness. How it is so quick to roll of people’s tongue as if saying it would suddenly make them catch the foul diseases I possess. Fear lies in that term. Fear of what it means to be mentally ill from both the ill and the spectators who believe they understand what is going on.

But, I am not my illness.

I am Courtney. A human being, who happens to suffer from PTSD and major depression.

Under no circumstance am I depression. I am not PTSD. There is more to me than an illness I have no control over. Why must others attempt to define me based on an illness they don’t truly understand?

Because there is so much more to me that mental illness. I’m a writer who can not stand to read her own writings unless someone else reads it first. An artist who prefers her art be private than out there for the world to see. I’m a teenager who loves music from before my time, like Cinderella. A girl who always dreamed of being a princess, simply so she could have a chance to change the world. Blue is my favorite color but I hate navy because in certain lights it looks black.

I am a complex individual.

Yes, my life is greatly affected by mental illness, but there is so much more to me than just PTSD or depression.