May 26, 2020:
There was nowhere to turn.
My mother, who was the poster girl for depression and anxiety, denied their existence. In her Ozarkian machismo she believed that "mental illness" meant "booby hatch", where brains are turned to toast by electricity and giant knitting needles are shoved up noses to permanently scramble the gray matter. Nosir kiddo. There's no such thing as "depression".
All adults were untrustworthy. They were incompetent and disinterested. They were bureaucrats and time-servers, or they were arrogant, and they were authoritarian without insight. Adult intervention had always resulted in disaster. There was every reason to steer as clear as possible.
Most of the kids meant well but I'd so thoroughly hidden behind masks that if I suddenly opened up they wouldn't believe me. It would have been interpreted as intellectual affectation, or reaction to bad trips. I'd created this situation but there was no changing it, and, I wouldn't have been emotionally able to if I'd known how.
I was in it by myself. The all-time classic symptomatic response shared by every depressive everywhere.