Amy Soto, a forensic science major from El Paso, Texas, is looking forward to a bright future after her upcoming graduation in 2018. However, things didn’t always look so bright. The junior looks back at her life and what has brought her here.

“This will sound terrible and anticlimactic, but I woke up one day and I was just happy. No, legit, and that’s probably the happiest I have ever been.

Sophomore year of high school in 2012, I was diagnosed with atypical depression and was very unhappy.

Four years of serious unhappiness, and then, in spring of 2016, I woke up and I was happy. It was the greatest feeling: to not know how to be happy and then you wake up one day and everything is okay. But not really.

Obviously I didn’t wake up depression-free, but I did wake up with some semblance of self that I didn’t know was still there. It was like I could finally get ahold of myself and my depression in a way that coexisted and that I could deal with. So everything was okay in that sense.

“That’s the happiest moment of my life because mostly I forgot how to stay happy for four years of my life. It was a combination of things: I met some really good people, and I cut out some bad people. Then I was just really working on coping because that’s what you have to do.

Because you don’t get better. You just kinda learn how to function with it, which sounds sad, but depression is a part of you and that’s who you are in some sense. You just have to take that person you are and just go with it and find out how to be your best self, depression and all, even though you are not happy.

I run. A lot. I listen to music and I actually talk about my depression with my family and close friends. My family are just really amazing, supportive people. Even though I’ve felt like I was alone, in the back of my mind, the rational part of me knows that they are going to love me no matter what and will help me get through everything.

Obviously, no parent wants to see their child be depressed. I still struggle. I judge myself too harshly. I am scared of not being good enough. I am scared of not being a good friend and a good daughter. I am scared of being a burden. I am scared of letting other people down. That’s what I put on myself.

But I deserve happiness and it is so hard to remember that sometimes. But I have to repeat it to myself again and again, even if I think I’m lying to myself when I say it.

For me the meaning of life is to be happy. Life is hard, man. And there is negativity out there. And school is hard. Times are stressful.

But at the end of the day, all you have is the attitude you approach the world with. If I can be happy, if I can be optimistic even when it is really hard to be, then it’s been a good day and I have done my duty as a human being.

It was a lot of little things which individually didn’t help, but altogether it culminated, until that one day everything just kind of seemed that it was going to be okay. From then, being at a pretty good point, I knew that I had to learn how to move forward and how to cope with it even more.