The Hard Question

I've spent a lot of time thinking over the years. About all kinds of things. Big things, little things, the machinations of the universe even. But tonight, there is something very hard that I'm thinking about. Tonight I'm thinking of how many things are my fault. And it's not even necessarily the fact that it's my fault, but maybe that it's the fault of my illness. Mental illnesses are a silent killer. They aren't treated the same, because we can't see them and a lot of the time the symptoms are all different from person to person. Mental illness is scary, because who wants to be told that they have something no one can see, but it can disable you all the same. I'm thinking of my illness tonight. My depression. My eight long years of fighting what seems like a losing battle. I'm thinking about how I did it, all on my own. And I'm thinking about why it is that I did.
The thing is, I spent years hiding it. Hiding that I had this factory defect that couldn't be fixed. Hiding this scar that I had on my brain. Because to me, it seemed like my pain wasn't quite as worthy as others. Like my pain wasn't nearly as important as say, a 9/11 survivor or a war veteran. I was just a teenage girl who had abandonment issues from her dad, attention issues from her mom, empty promises from a string of boyfriends that I should have known not to trust at that early age, and the death of the only father figure I knew. I thought that other people saw and dealt with so much more on a daily basis and my pain just wasn't enough to worry someone else over. So, I hid it. I pushed through. I was that horse that's partner passes out and takes the full load on my own. Now, after so many years, I'm finally out of steam. The problem however, is that I hid it too well.
For years, and probably even now, all I really wanted was to be noticed. And not just to be noticed but to be transparent. To have one person that could see through every wall I'd put up trying to protect myself. To find one person who could see the depression, even though I hid it.

No one ever saw it.

Some days, I didn't even see it.

But it's there. And it rears it's ugly head. I have days where I can't get out of bed. I have days where I feel like I'm Atlas, and God forbid that I shrug. I have days where I'm happy, and I have energy, and I feel great. I have days where I can't keep anything in my stomach, I can't even put anything in my stomach. I have days where I wonder what the world would be like if I wasn't in it. I have days where I think of how much less of a burden it would be if I wasn't around. Then I have the nights. I have the nights where I just want to cry myself to sleep. I have the nights where I stare blankly at the words on a page or at the TV screen. I have nights where I can't sleep. I have the nights that I think to myself "I should have just killed myself all those years ago."

So, to any reader I have out there, which probably isn't any; my question for you is this: How do I stop hiding it, if it's the one thing I excel at?