Day252- âThereâs no shelf space.â Jack would later go on to never finish this project, get severely depressed, unsuccessfully try take his own life and post this last photo in early 2018 while trying to make sense of how it all happened and if he could have prevented it. Turns out he couldnât and mental illness is a tough thing to both accept and to live with for the rest of your life. I woke up today and 3 years had passed me by. Iâll never forget those 3 years where what I knew as life showed itself to be the mask of coping. Before those 3 years I truly believed life was just meant to be sub par. As I lay on my kitchen floor on April the 6th 2016, my mouth with the residue of bleach still stinging my tastebuds after throwing up in the sink, I thought forwards and backwards and really why did I stop myself from leaving? My life hadnât lead up to this point, my life wasnât going anywhere, the familiar feeling of dread was all I felt. But deep deep down in my foggy brain I truly believed that things were going to get better. If then I could have only understood the next year would be the most challenging most mind bending learning experience of loneliness and catatonic willpower I would have for sure not run up to my parents screaming âI want to end this, help.â I would have left my dread and pain right there and then. But I was one of the lucky few who gets given an unbelievably small feeling that some how propels them from wanting to end it into the prison which is not having a life worth living at the same time compulsively wanting to stay here. It still sometimes feels unfair that the narrative of my life was set out before me and I was not capable of not being a part of it. However a strange new lens was slowly and painfully grafted onto everything. A lens which showed me a side to the world I had never seen. One of people suffering, coping and living good lives with a reality which bases itself on complex underlying factors which most of us have never known or have been unwilling to accept. The ongoing grey factors of the ever changing and morphing world of mental illness. To everyone given the chance to prevent a person from leaving this strange place, please stay with them, the next chapter in their life will be infinitely more painful than the moments before suicide. Thats when they need you. Prevention is just the first small step.
I look back on what I was and what I am today. I will never be happy with with happened to me, probably the most important cathartic 3 years of my life will not be thanked for their insights. Being thankful for my learning experience is like thanking someone for your new gained skills in a wheelchair after they chop off your legs, this is not just disrespectful to me but is disrespectful to the people who were never given my somewhat positive outcome. There are countless versions of me which never learned the tricks. There are versions of me who lay there bleach in their mouth and bleeding from their stumps with their brain and my experience holding the axe. I will never thank my narrative for so painfully making me the way I am. I will thank myself and the people who helped change it in spite of what it wanted me to be. I have changed many lives for the better. I have experienced a void I never thought possible. I sometimes see life the way it truly is. I survived and will continue to. Today I am a better person. Today was a good day.