Notes from the Inside: Teen Mental Health

Description

“Attendance” Summary
Some kids chase perfect attendance for prizes, praise, or parents who check grades like blood pressure. For her, it’s simpler than that: if she’s here, then she hasn’t disappeared. With sharp humor, raw honesty, and a heartbeat of hope, Attendance follows one teen through a school day where showing up is both the goal and the battle, and where the bravest word she learns to say isn’t “here” at all. Sometimes surviving the day is the only grade that matters.

Sample from “Attendance”

The first lie of the day is always the same.
“I’m up,” I tell my mom, even though I’m still in bed, and my voice sounds like it has been folded and put away in a drawer.
From the hallway she calls back, “You better be. You’ve got school.”
Like school is a place you go to and not a thing that happens to you whether you show up or not. I stare at the ceiling and try to negotiate with gravity.

“Just sit up,” I tell my body.

My body sends back a formal letter.
Dear Resident,
No.
Sincerely,
Legs
I keep my eyes on the little crack in the paint above my bed. It looks like a map of a country that doesn’t exist. I imagine tiny people living there who are also tired but still somehow milling about, cooking breakfast, doing taxes, colonizing small islands. Overachievers.
My alarm goes off again, not because it has to, but because it enjoys being hated.
I slap it quiet and whisper, “I’m coming. Relax.”
Nobody’s relaxed…

 

“Bathroom Mirror” Summary

In the two minutes between second and third period, the girls’ bathroom becomes a backstage world where everyone is performing, and she’s always one breath away from forgetting her lines. The mirror is a director with impossible standards. The fluorescent lights are stagehands with no mercy. And her own reflection feels like a role she has to earn: neutral, normal, fine.
But panic doesn’t care about bell schedules or perfect masks. It creeps in through tiny sounds, small moments, and the terrifying fear of being seen. When Kenzie and Maya find her teetering on the edge of disappearing, they don’t demand explanations or polish. They offer something rarer: presence, patience, and a way to stay.

Bathroom Mirror is a sharp, tender story about anxiety, masking, and the quiet courage of surviving the day, not by acting “fine,” but by letting someone stand beside you while you learn how to breathe again.

“Bathroom Mirror” Sample

The girls’ bathroom between second and third period is not a bathroom. It’s backstage. It’s a dressing room where everyone pretends they’re not rehearsing.
The mirror is the director. The fluorescent lights are cruel stagehands. The sink is a prop table. The paper towel dispenser is a heckler.
And I am always late to my own performance.

I push through the door and the smell hits first: cheap soap, sweet body spray, and something sharp like stress. A couple of girls are fixing their hair and talking about a quiz like it’s a personal betrayal. I keep my head down and walk straight to the far mirror, the one with the cracked corner. The crack is comforting. Proof that even glass can break and still do its job.
I plant my hands on the counter and stare at my face like it owes me an explanation.
Okay, I tell myself. You have two minutes.
Two minutes to become… acceptable.

My reflection stares back with tired eyes and a mouth that doesn’t know what expression it’s supposed to wear today.
I whisper, “Neutral.”
Neutral is safest. Neutral is the beige paint color of emotions. I relax my eyebrows. Flatten my mouth. Blink slowly.
Neutral says: I belong here. Nothing is wrong. I am not a problem.
My chest tightens anyway.
My brain starts speaking in captions. Too slow. Too weird. Your eyes look sad.
Fix that…

 

“Group Chat Ghost” Summary

She’s in the group chat. She’s just… never really in it.
From the outside, her phone is full of friends, memes, and inside jokes that scroll by like a life she can’t quite step into. On the inside, it’s drafts she never sends, jokes she deletes, and the  constant fear that one wrong message will prove what her anxiety keeps insisting: that she doesn’t belong.

But when she finally hits send on something real, the silence feels like freefall… until her screen lights up with unexpected kindness. Suddenly the “ghost” isn’t haunting the chat. She’s haunting herself, trapped between wanting to be seen and fearing what being seen might cost.

“Group Chat Ghost” is a sharp, funny, tender story about social anxiety in the digital age, thebravery of telling the truth in a world that rewards being “fine,” and the small, life-saving miracle
of friends who answer when it matters most.

“Group Chat Ghost” Sample

The first time I realized I was haunting my own life was when my thumb learned the shape of almost.
Almost send.
Almost speak.
Almost exist.
My phone says I have friends. It says I’m in eight group chats. It says I have a streak with Kenzie that has survived longer than some celebrity marriages.
But if you opened my messages, you’d mostly find… nothing.
Because I type things.
And then I delete them.
It’s not even a decision anymore. It’s muscle memory. Like flinching when someone raises their voice.