H.N.

I hold the saying “never judge a book by its cover” very close to my heart. Since I was 12 years old, I’ve hoped and prayed that people would see me for more than just what I showed them on the outside. For a long time, I didn’t realize that holding everything in prevented others from being able to understand and love me completely. 

I feel like I can’t really get into my story without giving a nutshell version of where it all began. In 2010, my mom was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer and in 2012, I held her hand as everyone told me she wasn’t with us anymore. There’s never a right time for a child to lose their parent, but at that moment— and even every once in a while still — it felt like the worst possible timing in the world.

For the next year of middle school, everyone knew me as the girl whose mom had died. I felt like a charity case every time someone tried to talk to me. As a result, I avoided that image when I started high school by not talking about it. Anything that I’d posted about my mom on social media I deleted by my sophomore year, so to a lot of my peers, I was just another student — a happy cheerleader who was good at English and a campus minister who participated in the spring musical every year. That’s exactly how I thought I wanted it to be. With the exception of my retreat small groups and my talk on senior year retreat (my high school was a private Catholic school), I tried to not make a big deal out of my family situation. I only ever explicitly told my closest friends about my mom, and even then I never fully expressed to them my continuous feelings of sadness and unresolved anger. Through it all, they loved and supported me in every way they knew how.

Coming to college, I worried about how I would get on without the support system I had at home. It’s not that I couldn’t function without my friends and family — I was more than stoked to be able to live in a brand new city and make my own decisions. The most difficult part about the transition turned out not to have anything to do with the new place itself but more so not having people here who I felt understood me on a deeper level. 

There were so many moments during my first year at Cal Poly when I just wished that I had a person whom I didn’t have to explain my entire life story to. When Parents’ Weekend, Mom’s Weekend or Mother’s Day came around, I didn’t know what to say when people asked what I was doing with my mom. When my friends would complain about missing their mothers, all I could do was nod and smile. All of the little moments of not knowing how to respond started to pile up and I began feeling more and more alone no matter how many people new people I met.

You know when you start making friends for the first time and everyone is nervous to be themselves? Everybody kind of tiptoes around the idea of being genuine and just tries their best to be “nice.” That’s been me ever since my mom passed. I didn’t want to weigh down my friends in high school with my problems. I didn’t want to burden any of my new college friends with the heaps of baggage that I’d accumulated over the past five years. I didn’t want people to act like my friend out of pity for me. I didn’t bring up my mom’s death because that, in my mind, led to explaining how I felt and I didn’t want to try and explain feelings that I thought nobody would grasp. What I failed to realize was that I wasn’t even giving anyone the opportunity to understand.

It wasn’t until my roommate found me sobbing on my bed on what would’ve been my mom’s 54th birthday that I finally told someone. I don’t remember the details of the whole interaction, but I do remember feeling the weight lift a little from my chest after talking to her about it. I remember her hugging me and asking me questions so that she could get a fuller sense of the story. I remember thinking “that wasn’t so bad,” but I also still knew that I wouldn’t bring it up voluntarily to anyone else at school. Since then, I’ve told maybe three or four other people, and being more open about it is still something I’m working on. Taking part in GWHI seemed like a necessary step in the process of reaching vulnerability. 

Every time someone finds out, they ask me the same question: “Why didn’t you say anything before?” My answer is always, “What was I supposed to say?”

If you met me today, you, like so many of my friends, probably would never know that any of this was weighing on my heart and I would probably never think to tell you. That’s the thing about judging a book by its cover — you write up a person’s entire story for them before they even get the chance to read it to you. Just as you might assume that someone is one way, they might act that way because they don’t think you’d get it if they were any more themselves. 

There are obvious reasons why I didn’t share how I felt on my social media — one of the most significant being that death and depression don’t really fit any kind of Instagram aesthetic. Despite how Twitter sometimes portrays it, anxiety and sadness aren’t really cool punchlines to any joke. I didn’t want to end up being just another long, sad caption that people rolled their eyes at and scrolled past. I felt — and still feel — like my story and so many others are worth more than a comment with a heart emoji or a double tap on a screen. If I had shared how I felt throughout high school and especially throughout my freshman year of college, I either would’ve been flooded with messages of love or I would’ve had to watch as people unfollowed me one by one. I’m not sure exactly how it would’ve looked or how others would’ve perceived it, but I’m hoping that through this project people become more aware that everyone has more to them than the filtered versions of their lives they post online.

To any person who may feel alone, overwhelmed, or misunderstood but still feel the need to portray themselves as happy and carefree, I get it. I’ve spent years plastering a smile on for the rest of the world and coming home only to cry myself to sleep. This still happens some days. Despite my heart knowing I’m loved, my head makes me overthink and feel as though the complete opposite is true. But it’s hard to realize how many people are out there who are able to love and understand you if you don’t let them in. You’re not a burden to people who care about you — they’re meant to be there for you to lean on. It’s not a joke and it’s not a bad thing to not be okay 100 percent of the time. Your experiences are important and how you feel is valid, so talk about it. There’s someone out there feeling exactly as you do, who needs to hear exactly how you handle it so they can pass on the survival guide to the next person in need.