There seems to never be enough time to be unwell in college. You don’t get a chance to breathe some days without the feeling that something is falling behind, dragging by your ankles like a weighted rake.

During the Black Death, people would whip at their own backs as a form of penance. My brain has been lashing out, lashing hard, and I feel the need for forgiveness from myself. To forgive my body for its weaknesses, my mind for its haze, its habit to overflow onto everything. I haven’t been to one of my classes in weeks; I’m months behind in the other. But it’s harder than ever to command my feet that the shame of digging them into the grass isn’t to be submitted to.

Therapists will tell you that therapy is the answer, and the pharmaceutical companies whisper, “take this pill and you’ll feel better in a couple of months.” The months seem a little less uncertain. But when you can’t trust your body to get out of bed to that hospital or your brain to let you think for long enough to remember it exists, it gets a little difficult to breathe. To swallow the pills.

People tell you how noble it is to be sick and how special you are, but they leave out the reality of it. The constant appetite for normality. The loneliness in rooms full of people, in arms of loved ones, in your own tissue. The isolation of self within cells that want what your mind finds trivial—to survive.

Going to the grocery or gas station turns into a slow motion “Saving Private Ryan,” in which every inch of every tissue is trying to locate the will in your core and productivity becomes one of the lost soldiers. It’s up in the bell tower, taking aim at the things you’ve put off, but it can only let out so many shots before your brain brings it down. The depression blows it up. The brick falls back to expose the dying things. And nothing gets done.

Don’t get me wrong, there are glimpses of beauty in the battle. Eyes like dandelions. Little wishes hidden away behind lashes that can become med kits in moments of emotional distress.

Unfortunately, love isn’t a cure for mental illness like the books and the movies will beg you to believe, but it can be a sanctuary. The soul on the steps of the church waiting to be let in and held for a while as the world spins past the front door. The heart being saved from the brain while the sickness eats away at the rest.

Like the farm dog inevitably entering the hen house and sucking the eggs dry. Like the tower plummeting through the soul and hitting the mud. The sniper of sincerity within waiting for the fog to lift to take aim at the pain and fire until it drops. Like a stone into the lake—the reality of the sickness having been there tangible only until the ripples die and give way to stillness.