I was born into a culture in which mental illness, for a person such as myself, is an almost inevitable outcome. Combine cultural intolerance, and the violent bullying that went along with it, with a genetic predisposition for illness and it seems unlikely I could have avoided it, no matter what I did.

I did not begin to experience the effects of illness until around the time of puberty (my childhood was mostly pretty positive, though not perfect); by the time I dropped out of high school, my illness was well-progressed; it is now deeply entrenched and unlikely to improve, despite all my efforts to combat it.