Mental illness: "it's just an excuse"

The chances are, if you have a mental illness and people know about it, you have heard someone say, "it's just an excuse." It's not an excuse, it's a mental illness. 

I remember when I was 15 I barred myself inside of my room and hid in my wardrobe because my social anxiety did not want me to go to school. I remember a night a few months later how I heard the shrill crying of a baby placed right outside my window for three hours, there was no baby. I remember crying on Christmas Day in front of my father's camera who was videoing us opening our presents. No one could understand why I was crying. It was because on my 15th Christmas I had expected to die on October the 20th of that year, my suicide date. Tears spilt and my body felt hallow. I was surrounded by family oblivious to the fact that the real Christmas miracle on that day was that I was still on this Earth with them. I never planned my wedding song, but God, I had planned my funeral songs since I was twelve years old . In fact, I had so many that it became a running joke that every sad song I listened to was my funeral song. How true that was. My depression became so bad that I decided one morning before school I would drink a cap-full size of the bottle of poison in my bathroom. I spewed it all up. I went to school that day as If nothing had ever happened. The stench of vomit and poison still on my breath. My social anxiety caused me to sleep on the side of my face that was more easily covered by my hair, to save my family from looking at my face in the mornings. I would so desperately wish to flip onto the other side, to give my neck some well-needed rest; I never did. In grade 8 every single day I would go to the office and claim I was sick. One time I walked home in the pouring rain to avoid having to be seen at school. I had a panic attack 3 quarters of the way home. My hair was soaked and my clothes drenched. I cried relentlessly, finally picking up the courage to call my dad to pick me up. His angry shouts at me for being lazy for never going to school still haunt me. For two years I cried every single night in my room while my family watched TV, my voice drowned out. Every night we would go for a drive and every night I would sit in the backseat, tears would silently roll down my face as I thought about the fact that I was going to kill myself soon and each time would be the last time we would do this as a family. No one ever realised I was crying, not even to this day. I still remember the taste of vomit in my mouth as I spewed up dinner - the only thing I had eaten that day. I remember almost passing out everyday for three months, all the while people praised me for weight loss. It's not a fucking excuse. In every single one of these moments my brain and myself were at war. Chemicals played tricks on me and my bed became my home, my home became foreign. Notebooks filled to the brim of suicide letters to my family remained faithfully under my bed. How many said sorry? How many were there? I still find some old ones today in moving boxes. Mental illnesses are mental illnesses - exactly that, illnesses. They are as real and as valid as cancer and diabetes. The only difference is that they manifest entirely within your brain and the symptoms are rarely recognised. Mental illness is debilitating, physically and emotionally. It robs you of so much. Some days you can't see past getting out of your bed. Some days the sun is your enemy. Some days you can do nothing but breathe. It is not an excuse, it is an illness.