When I fight with my friends it tears me up inside. I get really upset that I'll end up with no friends. I didn't have many friends in primary school and I don't want to go through that again.

I used to try and keep the peace all the time because I was so scared of losing my friends.

Now I know better because I learnt that I'm a good person and a good friend. I know that my true friends will stick by me even if we disagree. When we fight we get over it quickly and don't hold grudges.

As she moved the phone towards me I saw that she had hurt herself. It was horrible. I never knew someone could do something like that. I screamed and asked her why. It turns out my fun, bubbly, happy best friend actually had depression. I was shocked and scared for her. Later she was calling me crying and saying how she wanted to die and didn't deserve to live. She even tried to take her own life.

After a while it all got out of control. Eventually I made things worse for myself because I was getting so drunk I had no control over what I was doing. I was making mistakes that made me feel worse about myself. My silly solution to make things better and give me confidence to handle social situations was to drink more. Everyone began to know me as a 'party animal’, and 'getting messy' was my thing. Of course the drinking didn't fix anything and when my problems remained I got even more down on myself.

I went on a diet but it soon turned horribly wrong. I stopped eating around others and I started to restrict everything that I ate. I started to feel really bad and only ate dinner each day even though I was doing so much exercise with my Irish dancing, gymnastics and school work.

I then had to move schools and that was so sad as I had to leave my good friends. I am a very shy person - it was so hard for me to make new friends at the new school. This added to the stress in my life and my eating went from bad to worse. We had to do an assignment at school on eating disorders.