I sat at the kitchen table with a plate of green beans in front of me. I pushed them with my fork, back and forth, back and forth. While the rest of my family engaged in a lively conversation around me, I sat silently with my head hung low, staring at those green beans.

The talk and the clink of forks against plates silenced when my mother noticed my untouched green beans. “What's wrong?”

I pushed my green beans with my fork, back and forth, back and forth. A lump grew in my throat. “I'm just sad,” I replied, putting my fork down.

“Why?” she asked.

I tried to think of some logical reason for my sadness. But my thoughts were washed away by tears as I uttered the honest answer: “I don't know.” The truth was out, wafting through the air; mingling with the smell of marinara sauce and spaghetti: I was sad, and I didn't know why.

For weeks, I had cried late into the night until my pillow was soaked. Why? Why can't I make this overwhelming sadness stop? Can't I just forget about it? Why do I feel this way? I tried desperately to turn the feeling off until I finally realized that there wasn't a switch. So, I told myself that it'd be fine, that I was fine, nothing was wrong, and pushed the problem aside. But now here I sat, my problem plunked in the middle of the dinner table like a centerpiece for all to see.

“Take one day at a time,” my mother always said. And that's just what we did. Drifting in and out of different therapists' offices, swallowing various pills with my morning cereal, answering the question “How are you?” in total, raw honesty. Talking, working, learning, fighting, winning, losing. Good days, bad days, all right days. Things changed, time passed. Ideas, theories, thoughts swirled around me as people tried to answer the question I had asked myself: “Why are you sad?”

Slowly, nights became easier and my smile got brighter. Appointments were shorter, pills became fewer. I genuinely meant it when I finally said, “I'm feeling fine.” I smiled, I danced, I laughed, I played, and I soaked back up every drop of life that had been drained out of me. But even after the overwhelming waves of sadness calmed, I continued to ask myself “Why?”

What caused this sadness? I was in the third grade – a time when we are not supposed to have a care in the world. But mostly I was just glad that the waves were over, done, finished.

Three years later, I saw it. A doctor's form with my name on top, written in my mother's delicate handwriting. She had noted the time I got stung by six bees and how I had never broken a bone and that I took Tylenol for the aches in my leg. She filled in the blank that asked if I took any other medications, and in response to the question “Why?” she had written: Depression. At last, my sadness had been defined. The sleepless nights, the tears, the pills that filled up plastic orange cylinders with push and twist caps all had a name now: depression. I resented how that single word was supposed to represent the period of time that was lost, stolen from me. It could not adequately describe the moments when I believed the sadness would never end, how terrified I was to go to sleep at night, alone with my thoughts.

Today, I'm terrified of that word. I fear driving by the brick building with the room filled with plants that I went to on Thursdays, and I'm scared to reminisce with friends about the year we played Red Rover on the playground in our saddle shoes, because that was the year I lost. Photo albums that hold pictures of our family trip to the ocean sit at the back of the shelf because it was in that red beach house three blocks from the sea that I first felt the deep sadness. On horrible days – and even bad days that aren't so bad – I fear its return; I prepare myself to be drowned in waves of sadness again. I brace for the worst.

Yet, I haven't erased it. It's still written in my mother's delicate handwriting, in a small box within me. It stands in the midst of my memories of dancing in sun showers and sipping sweet hot chocolate on cold winter days. It mingles with my collection of facts and knowledge, and it weaves through memorized song lyrics and tunes. It blends with all the tiny pieces of me; it is a piece of me. I let it sit on my plate among the green beans because it adds flavor and color.