There were drawings on some of the pages. Mostly small and intricate: a necklace, a lake, figures dancing at a party. A face on one page, a woman with a Cupid’s bow and an open mouth with slightly crooked teeth. Her hand had paid special attention to the eyes. The irises resembled television static and there were dark abysses of pupils where the page was thin from the force of her hand. No hair, no eyebrows, and a scribble of a left ear.

One of the hardest parts of being very depressed for Ayanna was feeling afraid of her brain. There was an ease and confidence she’d had with herself before losing her sister, that had been easy to take for granted. Ayanna understood she was annoying sometimes, focused too much on her own feelings than on those of other people around her, but it was fine. It was like her inability to understand geometry—frustrating, but also able to be accepted. To be a person was to have faults. But when depression had curled itself through every fold and crease in her brain, there were days when the only positive at the end was Ayanna had not listened to its quiet appeals to end her life. Sometimes her brain made what felt like very reasonable and measured arguments that if she believed the golden path, the meadows, the mountains were all some form of a vast afterlife, well, what was the point of feeling this bad? She could try again in a new life. Someone could always bring her back. This world was ugly and cruel and filled with unkindness, and it was probably dying anyway. Every day, another public shooting, another record catastrophe, and people saying, Look, these things are fake, so we don’t have to try to make things better. And if not that, people seemed to go out of their way to reaffirm their commitment to wanting other people to suffer. They thought it was interesting to say people were getting worse and to be self-pitying about their time on Earth.

Why be alive? Ayanna would think while lying awake at night, feeling wired and listening to the snores of her freshman-year roommate. And then, she would take a beat, feel ashamed for the previous thought, and try to list off all the people who would feel something if they heard she was gone. She knew this too was an issue: you couldn’t only live for other people, but it was the easiest thing Ayanna could think of in these moments.

Looking at these pages, Ayanna felt the familiar twinge of distrust. Here could be proof she was not feeling better like she thought she was. The medication she took every morning, the biweekly conversations with the therapist, the journaling where she tried to sit and kindly speak to herself weren’t working. Here was her brain gnawing and scratching itself again.