Well, it's been an interesting night.

I think I tend to bury things that bother me, and not really deal with any of it, or really work through it. Like things with my dad, or my grandparents, or losing my aunt, or just general fears of abandonment. My whole life I've been doing this, really, and no one or anything has ever posed a challenge to that. There's been no scratching of the surface, or efforts to really break down the safety walls that I, like most people, have been building for my entire life. So while, to outward appearances, I am pretty normal, it's only by a conscious act of avoidance that I stay "strong." Well, that's crumbling for me right now, and it makes me feel like I'm going to crumble right along with it.

I've known for a while that depression runs in my family. My uncle had it really bad before I was born, and he still fights with it all the time, and then my mom fell victim when I was about 17-ish. But the thing is, I've been fighting various bouts of it for a lot of my life, and I've always, always been able to force myself out of it. But this time it's different, and I can't do it like I did before. There's so much built up, and so much at stake, that I really can't handle this on my own, and it scares the living piss out of me.

So I've decided to go to the counceling office at my school and make an appointment. In some ways it feels like I'm admitting defeat, but you know what? Screw that. If it's time for Stacy's Big Catharsis, well, I'm gonna need help making sense of all this shit in my head. So I'm really going to do this. And for my friends out there, the people who know me, please hold me accountable for this. If I get apathetic about it, bitch at me to go. Don't let me out of it easily.