It didn't start with a scream. It didn't start with a car crash or a funeral or a broken heart.
It started on a perfectly average Tuesday, three years ago.
I was twenty-four. I had a job I didn't hate as a junior graphic designer. I had an apartment with good light. I had parents who called me every Sunday to tell me they loved me.
I had won the lottery of a normal life.
I was sitting at my desk, editing photos for a marketing campaign. The sun was hitting my keyboard. My coffee was warm.
And suddenly, the color just... drained out.
It wasn't a dizzy spell. It wasn't physical. It was as if someone had reached into the settings of my brain and turned the saturation knob down from 100 to 0.
I blinked. I looked around the office.
My coworkers were laughing near the water cooler. Sarah (the old Sarah, before she knew me as "the sad girl") was showing someone pictures of her dog.
I knew, intellectually, that the scene should make me smile.
But I felt nothing.
Not sadness. Not anger. Just... static.
It was a quiet hum, like the sound of an old television tuned to a dead channel. A white noise that settled behind my eyes and muffled the world.
Maybe I'm just tired, I thought. Maybe I need vitamins.
So I went home. I ate a salad. I went to bed at 9:00 PM. I did everything the magazines tell you to do to "reset."
I woke up the next morning, and the static was louder.
Weeks passed.
The static became a fog.
It is a terrifying thing to lose your ability to enjoy things without knowing why.
I went to my parents' house for a barbecue. My dad was grilling burgers. My mom was laughing at a story my cousin told. The weather was perfect.
I stood there, holding a paper plate, and I felt like an alien.
I looked at them—these people who loved me, this food that should taste good—and I felt like I was watching them through a thick pane of glass.
I wanted to smash the glass. I wanted to scream, "I am in here! Why can't I feel you?"
But I just smiled.
"Great burger, Dad," I said.
"Thanks, honey!"
He didn't know I was lying. He didn't know the burger tasted like cardboard. He didn't know that inside my chest, there was a black hole expanding, eating every scrap of light that tried to enter.
That night, I looked in the bathroom mirror.
I looked for the trauma.
I searched my memory. Did something happen to me? Did someone hurt me?
I interrogated my own history.
No.
My childhood was trips to the beach and scraped knees and ice cream. My college years were stressed but fun. No one hit me. No one touched me when I didn't want them to. No one died.
So why?
Why did I wake up every morning disappointed that I hadn't died in my sleep?
The guilt was suffocating. How dare I feel this way? There are people in war zones. There are people starving. There are people who have lost their children.
And here I was, a privileged girl with a warm bed, crying on the bathroom floor because existing felt like carrying a hundred pounds of lead.
My brain was playing a mean joke. It was whispering, You don't belong here. You are a defect. You are taking up air that a happy person could use.
I decided to fight.
I wasn't ready to go yet. I still remembered what happiness felt like, and I wanted it back.
I made an appointment with a therapist. Dr. Aldis.
His office smelled like lavender and old paper. He was a kind man with kind eyes and a notebook.
"Tell me what brings you here," he said.
"I think I'm broken," I said.
"Broken how?"
"I have a good life," I told him. I listed my blessings like I was reading a grocery list. "Good parents. Job. Friends. Health."
"But?"
"But I want to drive my car into a bridge."
He stopped writing. He looked at me over his glasses.
"Has something happened recently? A breakup? A loss?"
"No."
"Stress at work?"
"No more than usual."
"Family history of trauma?"
"No."
He sighed, a soft sound. He leaned back.
"Sometimes," he said gently, "the brain is just an organ, like the liver or the lungs. Sometimes, the pancreas stops making insulin, and we get diabetes. Sometimes, the brain stops making serotonin, and we get depression."
"So it's just... chemistry?" I asked. "It's just a glitch?"
"Essentially. It's not your fault. You didn't do this."
"Can you fix it?"
"We can try to manage it. Medication. Therapy. Cognitive tools."
I clung to that word. Manage.
I walked out of there with a prescription for a pill and a plan.
I thought, Okay. This is just an illness. I can fight an illness.
I tried. God, I tried.
I took the pills. They made me nauseous, then they made me shake, and then, eventually, they made me numb.
Numb was better than sad, I guess. But it wasn't happy. It was just a flat line.
I went to therapy every Thursday. I talked about the void. I talked about the glass wall.
Dr. Aldis gave me tools. "Name three things you are grateful for." "Go for a walk." "Engage in a hobby."
I did them all. I was the perfect student of my own survival.
I bought the succulents because the internet said taking care of plants helps.
I adopted Barnaby because the internet said animals help.
And they did help, for a minute. A distraction here. A purr there.
But the static never stopped.
It was always there, a low-level hum in the background of my life, waiting for a quiet moment to roar.
One night, about six months into treatment, I couldn't sleep. The pills weren't working. The tea wasn't working.
I opened my laptop. I needed to be someone else. Anyone else.
I downloaded a game. Elyndor.
I created a character. I gave her silver hair and a giant sword. I named her QueenSlayer_92.
I entered the game world.
Immediately, a dragon swooped down. It breathed fire. My character took damage.
But I didn't panic. I clicked a button. She swung her sword. She hit back.
The dragon died. A fanfare played. Level Up.
I sat back in my chair, tears streaming down my face.
It was the first time in six months I had felt a sense of accomplishment.
In the real world, my enemy was invisible. I couldn't swing a sword at my serotonin levels. I couldn't hit my depression with a shield.
But here? Here, the monsters had health bars. Here, if I fought hard enough, I won.
That night, I played until the sun came up.
For six hours, I wasn't the girl with the glitchy brain. I wasn't the disappointment who couldn't be happy.
I was a warrior.
I thought I had found a way to survive. I thought I could live in two worlds—the gray one where I went to work and smiled at my parents, and the colorful one where I was strong.
I didn't know then that the gray world is jealous.
I didn't know that the static eats everything eventually. Even dragon slayers.
But back then, three years ago, sitting in the glow of my monitor, I had hope.
And hope is the cruelest thing of all, because it hurts the most when it dies.