It was a Tuesday, but it might as well have been any other day. They all blurred together lately. I woke up to the sound of my alarm, its shrill beeping cutting through the fog in my mind. I hit snooze, like I always did, and lay there staring at the ceiling. The weight on my chest was heavier than usual, pressing down until it felt hard to breathe. But I got up. I always got up.

I went through the motions—shower, coffee, commute. The office was the same as it always was: fluorescent lights, the hum of printers, the faint smell of stale coffee. I sat at my desk, my computer screen glowing in front of me, but I couldn’t focus. The numbers on the spreadsheet swam before my eyes, and my mind kept drifting to places I didn’t want to go.

“Hey, you okay?” My coworker, Jess, leaned over the partition, her brow furrowed. “You’ve been quiet all morning.”

I forced a smile, the kind I’d perfected over the years. “Yeah, just tired. Didn’t sleep well.”

She nodded, satisfied, and went back to her work. But the truth was, I wasn’t okay. I hadn’t been okay for a long time. I just didn’t know how to say it. How do you tell someone that you feel like you’re drowning, even when you’re sitting at your desk in a perfectly normal office? How do you explain that the world feels like it’s closing in on you, even when nothing’s wrong?

The day dragged on, each hour feeling longer than the last. By lunchtime, I couldn’t take it anymore. I slipped out of the office and walked to the park across the street, my hands shoved deep in my pockets. The air was crisp, the kind of cold that bites at your skin, but I barely felt it. I sat on a bench, staring at the ground, and tried to steady my breathing. But the harder I tried, the worse it got. My chest tightened, my vision blurred, and suddenly, I couldn’t breathe at all.

I don’t know how long I sat there, gasping for air, tears streaming down my face. People walked by, but no one stopped. Maybe they didn’t notice. Or maybe they didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do either. I just knew I couldn’t keep pretending.

When I finally made it back to the office, Jess took one look at me and knew something was wrong. “Hey,” she said softly, pulling me into the break room. “Talk to me.”

And for the first time, I did. I told her about the sleepless nights, the constant ache in my chest, the way I felt like I was watching my life from the outside. I told her about the mask I wore every day, the one that made it look like I had it all together. And I told her how tired I was of wearing it.

She listened without judgment, her hand resting on mine. “You don’t have to do this alone,” she said. “There’s help out there. You just have to ask for it.”

Her words hit me like a lifeline. For so long, I’d been afraid to admit how much I was struggling, afraid of what people would think. But in that moment, I realized that the only thing scarier than asking for help was continuing to suffer in silence.

That night, I sat down at my kitchen table and did something I’d been putting off for years: I called a therapist. My hands shook as I dialed the number, and my voice wavered as I spoke, but I did it. And for the first time in a long time, I felt a glimmer of hope.

It wasn’t an easy day. In fact, it was one of the hardest days of my life. But it was also the day I stopped pretending. The day I admitted that I couldn’t do it alone. And the day I took the first step toward healing.

Mental health isn’t something you can fix overnight. It’s a journey, and it’s messy, and it’s hard. But it’s a journey worth taking. Because no matter how dark things seem, there’s always a way forward. You just have to be brave enough to take the first step.