The couch felt scratchy underneath me as my little legs swung back and forth. At 8 years old, the concept of sitting still for more than five minutes was a completely foreign concept. Across the room on another couch sat my parents.

“Kayla,” my mom said, “we need to talk about something important.”

I remember feeling ecstatic, thinking the talk was about our upcoming vacation. My mom looked at my dad and continued.

“You remember Dr. Harney?” she asked.

I nodded. My mom had been seeing him a lot recently. She laid in a big metal tube and she wasn’t allowed to move at all, not even to talk.

“Mommy is sick,” she said. “It’s called MS. I’m going to need you to be brave, Kayla. You’re going to have to be a big girl for mommy. Can you do that for me?”

I smiled the biggest smile I could manage and replied, “I can do that.”

Multiple sclerosis, or MS, in short, is a homewrecker. Somewhere along the span of my mother’s 29 years on this planet, her immune system made a huge mistake. For uncertain reasons, her body no longer recognized her nerve cells and began to attack them. This severely affected her brain processing ability as well as her mobility.

My dad’s job required him to travel during the week, so most of the time it was only my mom, my little brother and me at home. When my mother’s MS got bad, I ran the household. I can remember pulling dining room chairs up to the stovetop so I could make dinner for the family. I held mom’s hair back whenever the vertigo was too much to take. By 8 years old, I vacuumed, did dishes, did laundry, enforced my brother’s bedtime and was the best stand-in mom I could be.

One night, when an especially bad MS attack left my mom unable to move from the couch, I snuck downstairs and sat by her side. The stress from running a house alone was beginning to be too much for me to handle. I sat quietly and watched my mom’s stomach rise and fall with her breathing, until it stopped. I began to panic, thinking she had stopped breathing. My head blazed with panic as I shook her shoulders, desperately trying to wake her. She opened her eyes and asked me what was wrong. I realized I was mistaken. At 9 years old, I had my first panic attack.

Not long after, I became extremely depressed. I lost interest in school, in my life at home. I merely ran through the motions. I knew what was expected of me, and I did just that. I felt as though I was watching my mother slowly die in front of me. I felt helpless. My mood fluctuated between anger, sadness and an all-encompassing numbness. I was willing to go to drastic lengths to feel again, so at 10 years old, I self-harmed for the first time.

The next four years were a cycle of self-destructive behaviors. From refusing to eat, to self-harm, to unusual bouts of fury, I was beginning to fall apart under the stress I put myself under trying to be the perfect daughter/mother/student. I fought with my parents often, desperately trying to distract them from what I was going through. It worked pretty well, too.

I went through hour after hour of therapy, some with my parents, some alone. Eventually I met a woman named Dr. Kreins. Unlike some of the other doctors I’d met, she seemed genuinely interested in the trials I had gone through. I described my intense anger, my inability to place trust in people, my frequent rocky relationships. Together we arrived at my official diagnosis: borderline personality disorder with a considerable splash of depersonalization disorder.

After my diagnosis, I was able to more effectively work on the root of the issue, an ingrained fear of abandonment as a result of my mother’s sickness.

I’m sure you’re expecting a lovely fairytale ending. That’s how these stories usually work, right? Unfortunately, that isn’t the hand I was dealt. That isn’t to say my life hasn’t improved, though. I haven’t self-harmed in so long, my scars are beginning to fade.

My mom and I are currently on good terms, and arguments are sparse.

My life isn’t perfect by any means, but it is better. Throughout everything I’ve been through, everything I’ve put my family through, I’ve learned how to be strong, how to be the brave girl my mother asked me to be. I’ve learned that fear does not equate to weakness, that falling short sometimes does not make me inadequate. They come and go, but the effects of your choices on the people you love don’t fade. That’s the nature of the beast with illnesses. Life isn’t always easy, but it is worth living.