A Letter to Our Parents
Photo by Jerome
Each day is the same. Each night is the same. Blurred together in one prolonged, incessant bad dream. For the past nine months, it’s been a constant war between my mind and myself, one that I end up losing no matter what.
June marks the beginning of my downward spiral, a desire to be her––thin-waisted and beautiful, two things that are completely separate but merged together by my mind. Every time I look in the mirror, I realize another imperfection. Another reason why I’m not good enough and why I never will be. All I want is to be able to crawl out of my own skin, to escape from the body that brings me this unbearable pain and self-hatred. Screams caught in my throat. Clenched fists, fingernails digging into my palm. Dull pain throughout my entire body, eventually numbing me to the point where I fall asleep. I am a witness to my own destruction.
However, I am not alone in this struggle. My story is that of teens all across the country, who face their own relentless internal battles every day. I can speak for most of us when I say that we are misunderstood. We are so misunderstood to the point where we are stripped of our lives, our youth, our friendships, and our families.
What most of you don’t know is how skilled we’ve become at lying. We have grown accustomed to keeping our emotions bottled up inside, afraid of your judgment or disappointment. “I’m fine, just tired.” Those words slip out of our mouths almost instinctively. A survival skill to protect ourselves from harm.
The lack of communication and understanding between you and us stems from generational barriers, walls that we should be working to tear down but are somehow only strengthened argument after argument. I could spew fifty-page essays about why mental illnesses and mental health issues are real, but everything would simply fly right over your head. You say that we have nothing to be sad about, when our pain can come from our own thoughts, from uncontrollable thoughts, from experiences we’ve never had the guts to tell you about. You say our pain doesn’t exist when you have no idea of what it’s like to be in our shoes. You throw every possible excuse at us because you don’t want to admit that your own child could somehow be fucked up in the head, but all that you’re doing is making it worse and worse until we’re so far lost in our anguish that we may never come back.
“I often think about not making it through high school and it’s a very valid thought for me. 100% serious.”
In search of answers that could explain where our pain was coming from and why it seemed to never go away, I posted a survey on social media. 48 high school students from all across the United States responded to questions about causes of stress, whether or not they were diagnosed with a mental illness, and the influence you have had on their mental health. Together, these 48 responses tell a larger story of a mental health crisis plaguing my generation and how you seem to be oblivious to it all.
The number one source of stress and pain comes from within ourselves. Our own self-esteem, influenced by parental demands and high expectations, as well as from the societal standards set for us, which are continually reinforced by social media. For many, having been in the midst of a pandemic for over nine months has also led to an overwhelming amount of stress from fights and tensions within the family, distancing from friends, and the political and social instability of the United States.
“School, for me and other people, has always been a daily escape from the stress of home life. Being home every day around my parents has been horrible.”
In the survey, I asked teens what they wished their parents would do to help, and over half said something along the lines of listening. It truly is astounding to imagine how difficult it could be to simply take a moment and listen to us explain what we’re going through without invalidating our struggles. Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not real. Self-hatred and low self-esteem. Black-and-white or borderline thinking. Intrusive thoughts. Unreasonable anxiety or paranoia. Obsession. The list goes on. Mental illnesses require the same urgency and effort of care that you give physical illnesses – going to a therapist should be no different than going to a doctor. Frustratingly, for many of us, it has come to a point where we are so exhausted from being trapped in our own minds that we cannot possibly find the energy to explain to you for the fortieth time that our problems simply exist.
“I wish my parent could see outside themself in order to understand the effects they have on me.”
So we keep our struggles buried underneath a smile. Hidden behind the persona of who you expect and want us to be, and forced to live with our own pain because you choose not to believe in it.
“I want a hug. I don’t know how to ask for one.”