Houses Competition. Ravenclaw Head of House, Round Six. Additional, Prompt: Pride, WC: 837

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Don't let them show. Just like Elsa; even your hair is white blonde and your skin is colder than ice and the frozen atmosphere. Don't let your feelings show.

These are the thoughts that plague my head every day. Every day in this life is clouded over by my own anxiety, and by stress that threatens to suffocate, and panic attacks that throw themselves at me in times of disorientation. The aching, deafening, horrifying depths of depression that I fall into - more so when I'm alone.

I have fallen into the traps that my family set, about pride and privilege and prejudice. Even though I read all of these tips on how to be better, on how to get better, my pride overrides everything.

One key thing the articles say is to tell people how you're feeling. To express your feelings aloud is to make it known to yourself, rather than being about letting someone else know your trials and tribulations. They say that you shouldn't keep it all inside, especially if the emotions are bursting from within, exploding out at horrible, random intervals. Which they are. Just last Tuesday I was in Tesco, checking the ingredients for a new cake batter for my mother, and I felt the sudden clenching of my heart, and the box fell from my fingers. All breath left me. I was suffocating on my own thoughts.

Even now, I'm not sure what set it off. I must have read something, thought of something else, and my brain shut down completely. It was all I could do to not sink down to the ground and hold onto the shelves for some semblance of support and guidance.

During those times, it's difficult to hold the emotions inside. It's difficult to tell people you can't breathe when you cannot speak for lack of breath. It's even more difficult to tell them that you're having a panic attack. But when it was finally over, and a middle-aged mother asked me if I was okay, I told her that I had choked on a walnut I'd been eating.

I told a damned, odious lie to an innocent woman. I'm trash. My pride is worth too much, and it should be worth nothing at all.

I didn't want her to think I was weak. I don't want anyone to think that I am weak.

The rest of my family are exactly the same. They maintain an image for everyone else, and they break down behind the thick curtains of our household, and our lives.

We appear wealthy - we are wealthy - but we are not so in love and companionship. My father has a mistress, and my mother and he do not share a bedroom. In public, they are blissfully in love. Really, they despise each other. We do not eat food together, but separately, on our own terms. The only reason I was buying my mother cake mix was so she could take it in for a work colleague and make things seem as though she is the baker, the homemaker, the brilliant mother and astonishingly perfect wife. It could not be further from the truth, and it is all to fuel the lies and make sure people believe that we are better than the truth.

We are no better than other people. I spend my days withering away from the trippings of mental health. Weeping, eating nothing because I cannot stomach anything, aching, unable to move for fear, suffocation, or some other ailment that becomes my excuse for the given day.

The trick is to fight through the pain most days. Know that there will be people watching, and you should appear strong and brave and honest. You should appear nonchalant about how boring your life is, while last night you were suffocating, screaming into your pillow, fighting the urge to reach for the antidepressants you never went to the doctor to get.

Fight through the pain to appear normal. Struggle when you are away from the people.

Struggle when pride allows it.

Don't show the world that you are struggling. My motto is to hide it - hide everything, remove myself from my emotional problems. If I remove myself from my own problems, separate myself from what is going on at home, then I can pretend some semblance of normality and feel better.

That is what should happen. I want to show the world that I am normal, and by extension show myself that I can get over this. I can be better than the gutting pain, the stabbing aches, the suffocating, the crying, the screaming, the want to be nothing more than dust on someone else's shoe.

That's what I want. And hopefully one day I will be better than the pain, own it, and I can be the Draco Malfoy that everyone else sees.

But I'm not. I am an image glued to the front of what remains of myself.

I am far less than what I pretend to be, and what I am.

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Thanks for reading!