how lovely that depression is acceptable only until the breakdown. it must garner sympathy but must not inconvenience, look pitiful but not be unproductive; like you are allowed to be empty but only until the deadline, will receive prayers and patience only until your sadness translates into lazy; they will claim to understand only until you have stayed days in without seeing sunlight, fallen behind on classes, missed projects you cannot return to.
your education and your government will allow you to be suffering up until it ties you to bed, makes you miss days of work and drown in debt and lose yourself; afterwards it will call these faults the folly of an able, merely careless mind;
mental illness is a ghostly disease — it exists and everyone fears it tells you to check in regularly on your friends for it speaks of it only in respectful tones a hushed whisper about the rising death toll or buried in a joke about the great millennial existentialism (how wonderful that we have grown close enough to darkness to be able to laugh at it)
and yet you cannot call it real cannot claim it as an excuse for not sleeping or not eating or not waking or — worse — not working.
how stupid that we are allowed to be hopeless so long as we are not tired.
here's a secret: the system does not care about you