According to my mom, I started showing signs of depression and anxiety at five years old. I’ve been in therapy ever since, and I cannot remember a life without weekly appointments. When my childhood got swallowed by mental illness, I didn’t know how to define myself outside of it. It was all I knew.

Nina Kahn: twenty years old. What else about me matters?

I turned to film and television to process the feelings I couldn’t deal with. I had my first kiss alongside Lady Bird and Rory Gilmore, smoked and drank with the cast of Freaks and Geeks, and ran away with the love of my life in Moonrise Kingdom. These characters could feel for me, could be messy, and loud, and earnest in a way I feared more than anything else.

Believing I deserved nothing; I denied myself the freedom to desire, to daydream about the life and loves I craved. Romance, wild parties, and indestructible friendships soon became as fictional to me as the worlds to which I escaped.

So went middle school, then high school … The numbness began to consume me to degrees I had never experienced, reaching its worst during my freshman year at Emerson. I haunted my dark Little Building single without speaking to anyone besides my classmates (and only when I absolutely had to) for eight months.

Life was for other people, not me. A functioning person would never want to chaperone the 12-year-old girl playing dress-up as an adult and fooling nobody.

Only within the last year, did I begin to realize the magnitude of what I had gone through as a teenager. What I now recognize as a dissociative state felt like drifting through the world in a spacesuit; drifting untethered, too aware of my breathing, everything a million miles away. Suddenly I’ve crash-landed to Earth after years in the clouds.

When describing my experience to my therapist recently, I could still only equate myself to Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later, coming out of a coma to discover a deserted London overtaken by a zombie apocalypse. Where had I been this whole time, and what had been happening while I was unconscious? You mean all of this was happening around me the entire time? Nothing had felt real. I was nothing more than a character.

It was devastating to admit that I was not, in fact, cosmically cursed. I did this to myself, and now I have to reckon with the consequences. My sadness turned into a deep anger at myself for causing what I thought was irrevocable damage.

I am no longer angry at my younger self. Instead, I mourn for the childhood I never got to have. Adolescent Nina deserved to be herself. She deserved to do her hair and dress in ways that made her feel beautiful, even if she’d cringe at them today. Having crushes like every other teenager did not make her disgusting or crazy, nor should they have gone unadmitted—not even to friends—for years. More than anything, I wish I could tell her that it is not stupid, embarrassing, or dangerous to want something more.

It would be a complete lie if I said this new chapter in my life has resolved all of my personal struggles. I still feel the pressure of being “caught up” to my peers as a young adult. I’m far from being confident in my own skin. Every irrevocable way I’ve shrunk myself radiates phantom pain, even as I grow. Nonetheless, emerging from my arrested development has its highs as well as low moments. Despite the weight of reflecting on my past, there is a profound joy in finally feeling this intensely. I get to cry in my room to My Chemical Romance for the first time. I’m decorating my walls with pictures of everything I love. Whatever crushes I develop, I’ll allow to flourish in all their giddy, gross glory. Vulnerability is so beautifully freeing.

I’m Nina Kahn. I am 20 years old. I don’t know who I am, but I know that I have full control over who I will become.

And I can’t wait to meet her.

Puberty Post-Mortem