I have lived half my life inside rooms that hum like machines. Rooms that smell of disinfectant and rain, where the clocks tick louder than my heartbeat and the silence has teeth. The first time I went in, they told me it was temporary. Just until the world stopped spinning, until I could breathe without drowning. But the world kept spinning, and I kept sinking, and time became a hallway I could never leave. There were white coats, kind eyes, voices that spoke in careful tones — as if one wrong word might shatter what was left of me. And maybe they were right. Because back then, I was glass pretending to be bone. I learned the rhythm of locked doors, the sigh of paper wristbands, the taste of pills dissolving under my tongue. I learned that healing isn’t a moment — it’s a loop, a cycle, a cruel kind of déjà vu. Time after time after time again, I returned. Different faces, same walls. New scars, same ache. The nurses changed, the air didn’t. At night, I’d lie in my bed and listen to the hum of the building breathing. Somewhere down the hall, someone would be crying — a quiet, broken sound, like a child trying to remember what comfort feels like. And I’d whisper back, “I know.” Because I did. Depression isn’t a monster. It’s the fog that blurs your reflection until you forget you were ever human. It’s waking up and wishing you hadn’t. It’s smiling so people stop asking, and crying in bathrooms because you can’t hold it anymore. Anxiety is her sister — a frantic, trembling ghost. She lives in my chest, knocking on my ribs like a desperate thing, asking, are you sure you can do this? And I never knew how to answer. Because I was never sure.