I have struggled with the idea of posting this for a long time, but I have finally decided to make a post because I think it is important.
I guess you could say I won my fight with suicide. When I was ten or eleven my life started to change in a lot of ways I wasn’t prepared for. My family wasn’t the same and would never be the same again. There were new stressors, and the adults in my life were often unable to take care of me the way I was used to because they were going through things too. This was the start of my downward spiral. I became more anxious, to the point where going to school was torture because I was so afraid of being noticed or doing something wrong. I also stopped enjoying things. As a child there were so many things that made me happy, but now those things just seemed like a chore; something I had to do to seem normal or okay, or because someone expected me to do them. I eventually stopped feeling anything positive. I mostly just felt empty or nothing with the occasional feeling of being a giant disappointment to the people in my life. I couldn’t see it then, but I was depressed.
My parents had me see a therapist for one session, but either I fooled him or my parents believed me when I said I didn’t need him. I was so afraid of being the psych patient and having people view me differently that I kept it all inside. I was afraid to ask for help, because I was afraid of my life changing again. Part of me wishes I hadn’t done that. I wonder how much more I could have accomplished, how much suffering I could have avoided if I’d only been brave enough to ask for help.
Eventually all of my free time was spent thinking about escape. At first it was running away and living in the woods (I had read My Side of the Mountain about that time), and then it evolved to thinking about escaping my life in a more final way. I often fantasized about overdosing on pills, just so that I wouldn’t have to feel the emptiness and the disappointment anymore. I had also convinced myself that almost everyone would be better off without me. My parents and sister would be relieved that they didn’t have to deal with me anymore.
There were 3 reasons why I didn’t do what I so wanted to do back then. First, I was afraid. I was afraid to die, afraid to commit to something I couldn’t take back, and I was just lucky the balance never tipped to where the pain overtook the fear. Second I had a close friend who was suffering in much the same way I was, and a part of me knew that if I did it, he would follow. I did not want to be responsible for that. The third reason, probably the most important reason, was because I had one person, just one, in my life who I never felt like I was a disappointment to, and who I knew would be sad if I was gone; my grandmother. She was just a wonderful person who loved me unconditionally no matter how moody I was, or how much I had changed. She only wanted me to be happy and was willing to do whatever it took to make that happen. She didn’t judge or criticize me like the other adults in my life.
So I spent a few years doing this downward spiral and then in this limbo of suffering. The whole time I never spoke to anyone about it, or tried to hint at where I was in my head. Then things started to change for me. Things started to make me happy again. It was slow, but those feelings of emptiness started to fade and things started improving. I made some friends who showed me how to be young and live my life. My improved mood caused the criticism to stop because I started doing better. Eventually I was happy more days than I wasn’t, and even when life handed me challenges that I thought I could never handle (like losing my grandmother) I never went back to that place. I could be sad, but it wasn’t part of my personality anymore.
I guess the reason I went ahead and posted about this is because I want to encourage people to never give up. Death is an absolute end and life always has the potential to be a beginning, if you want it to be. Also I spoke a lot about feeling like people would be better off without me. That is never true no matter who you are. I see now that if I had killed myself my family would have suffered, my teachers would have suffered, people who barely knew me would have suffered. I would have changed lives for the worse. I have seen young people take their lives and my heart always hurts for them because they have lost their chance at something better. I have such great relationships with my family now, and I hate to think about what I could have done to them. I still haven’t ever talked about this with any of them because I don’t want to hurt them. The only reason I wrote about it now is because I want people to have hope, I want them to keep going, to keep trying, until they find their new beginning, because I promise it is out there.
