“That won’t last forever.” “You need to think about something serious.” “You can’t just spend money and live in luxury forever.”

I was 16 when the world shut down, and strangely, something inside me switched on. While everything around me felt uncertain, I started building, partly because I didn’t know what else to do. What most people didn’t see was that, beneath the drive and presented on social media, I was already fighting battles that weren’t visible. My anxiety had started in secondary school - about 12, but it was around 16 time that depression first took hold. I was put on medication for a sepa