I feel so dead and empty today, and I don’t want to go to school tomorrow, but I know I won’t graduate/will be taken to truancy court if I miss too many days, so I have to grit my teeth and go anyways, hiding my pain and pretending it’s all okay, because they don’t actually care about my mental health. They only “care” when it makes me perform less, when it makes the machine less fast and convenient, when it makes me produce less for the big man’s wallet.
I’m so fucking tired. I don’t even care anymore. I’ve just given up on that. I’m fucking tired of putting on fake smiles just for the self-assurance of one tuxedo man’s big dream. Just for someone else’s happiness, while my misery and slow death goes on forever.
I’ve always been suicidal and depressed. But I wasn’t diagnosed or medicated until around late 2023-early 2024, when I almost killed myself in 6th grade. Even now, I’m doing terribly, and I just so badly wish the pain would end. It just isn’t worth it…
I wish I didn’t have to carry all this weight with me at 14 (turning 15 this October), but it’s impossible not to do so considering what I am: neurodivergent, black, and queer. Right from the moment, I’ve been excluded, ostracized, and made to feel guilty and shameful for just….existing. I was forced to confront my very being and standing in this world from very early on, and I’ve grown up too quickly. I’m statistically more likely to get neurodegenerative brain disease like dementia later in life, too, so that’s just fucking great.
It’s just so hard to live with myself when I know the world will just keep burning and going in the same man-destroying-man loop over and fucking over again, and when I forever live in guilt for every terrible thing, every catastrophic misdeed I have committed, and even guilt for things I didn’t do, because my mind can’t even understand that some bad things I don’t do, and convinces itself I did do them.
I have so much to lose, and yet it’s harder to take that seriously when I’m this desperate for my agony and pain to end.
And knowing that there is no true cure for depression or anxiety, and that I’ll forever have to force down and put so much thought and energy into trying to cope with it just makes the pain worse, knowing that I’ll suffer forever, for as long as I live. I won’t find peace even in death, as there will still be people laughing at and desecrating my rotting name and my hung corpse lying above that chair with the chicken-scratch goodbye note on it.
You aren’t alone, Leelah Alcorn. I don’t believe in heaven, hell, or God, but I hope she can see this somehow. I’m just like you. You’re not alone.
I just can’t believe it’s already been 12 years. And now to see people turn trans suicides into a meme, to detach themselves from responsibility so they don’t have to come to terms with how they caused it and contributed to it with their own unthinking hated spurred by the big media messages fed to them from birth….it makes me fucking SICK.
Ever just……completely give up on humanity, just completely forget about having any faith or trust in anything? Seeing everyone just fall for the same scams and tricks over and over again, and just cave into their animalistic desires of man-destroying-man, with no true purpose to any of it….there’s a good reason I’ve given up on trusting people. Isn’t it just….funny to think that there was a time where I believed that people genuinely cared about me and wanted what’s best for me and for this world? How naïve and stupid I was back then…..now I know everything’s a lie. Nothing is real anymore.
Even just going to school and seeing my classmates completely sickens and angers me.
How are you doing? I’m ok……?
I feel a strange sense of dread and worry, but I can’t quite place it. I know that the fact I gotta go to school tomorrow (I didn’t go today because I just couldn’t mentally handle even the mere thought of going to school today) is contributing to it, and yet I feel like it’s more than just that. I know it’s more…but I don’t know what the other causes are.
I remember having these feelings and thoughts that I now know is suicidal depression and anxiety, my entire life, even when I was a little kid. I even self-harmed at like…age 5. I’d bite my arms and bash my head with any blunt object I could find. I just didn’t know it. I thought it was all a lie. Even now, I struggle to believe myself, and believe even things I know for sure. Back then, it was even worse. I genuinely thought that I was just making it all up and that I was just being dramatic.
Funny how that happens when I’ve nearly killed myself several times over the past 3 years, and have these fucked up mood swings, where one moment, I think I feel happy, like I have no problems and am the jolliest kid on Earth, and then the next day, I feel hopeless…like I’m alone, at the end of an empty desert road, like I’m at the Finistaire (literally means “end of the earth”, as in the physical stopping point of the land. Nothing beyond this point) of life, and just want this exhausting and suffocating unknown pain to end. And other times….I just feel nothing. Just blank.
I feel a dull fear right now…..but fear of what? I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m trying to distract myself from anymore.
What do I feel? Why do I feel?
The 1991-2002 Sierra Leonean Civil War is the only reason I was born in Houston and not Kamabai. It’s the only reason I live among a bunch of strangers in the USA and not with my cousins, brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles home in Africa. I miss the home I never got to see. I’ve never been outside of the USA. Please take me home.
Here in the USA, I feel like an alien, and yet I know my cousins in Kamabai wouldn’t even recognize me as their own kin. I don’t sound like them. I don’t know a single word of Mandinka or Wolof. My skin looks Indian, because I am half-white (my skin is brown, while my dad is jet black). All they’ll see is a foreigner. They’ll see an “American”. But I don’t want that. I’m not American. I feel no connection to US culture.
So what am I? I’m just….floating from nowhere, I guess. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t half-white, just so my cousins across the sea could actually see themselves in me, so that they could actually recognize me. I’ve never even met them. I know hundreds of them exist….but I don’t know any of their names. I don’t know who they are.
It hurts me to know that nobody will recognize me anywhere I go, not even my own Mandinka and Wolof people. At least I know what I am, so there’s that, I guess? I want to go home.
I miss Africa. I miss Bamako. I miss Timbuktu. I miss Freetown. I miss you. I’ve never stepped a single inch on your land, but I miss you. Hear me….please hear me, motherland.
I’m only a generation removed (dad is a direct immigrant from Sierra Leone), and yet I’ve already lost home. I can’t imagine how much worse the pain is for the Blacks descended from slavery. They lost their home hundreds of years ago and have changed culturally so much, that they can’t even connect anymore…it hurts me to see that. To see them realize that.
And it hurts me that even my own brother and sister don’t associate themselves with home. I’ve asked them before. They feel no connection to Africa, and they don’t really think about it much….it just hurts to see that….they’ve forgotten home. They’ve forgotten where they are really from…..who they are….
It’s just…..so….strange, when one moment, you are so sure that everything is okay, that you have no problems and are genuinely happy….and then the next, you’ve completely lost everything that made your reason, that gave you a self, that you are forever living in a loop of dull pain and a nothing that hurts worse to be in than the swirling flame burning outside of your little bubble, and all you seek now is just…a final end to it….it feels like I’m being…thrown for a loop, into a rollercoaster made of nothing, by my own mind, and raped by my own thoughts, while being given this horrible grin in response.
I feel shame and guilt for a monster I never was. I feel the dread for the moment I will finally have to answer for every mistake, whether real or not. I feel so much hatred of myself, and so much regret, for every mistake I’ve ever made, even if it was something I never even did. Just accusing me of something is enough for me to fall into a suffocating cloud of shame, because I have had things done and said to me and then, when I call it out, told that it never happened and that it’s all my fault, so many times, that now, even when I know I didn’t do it, I still convince myself I did, and that it’s my burden to bear, my chain to hold, my straws to hold on my back until the last second.
I can’t even shit with the lights on anymore, because I can feel a thousand eyes glaring at every crack on my flesh and writing it down on clipboards to determine later’s punishment. For how long I stay alive, I’ll forever be haunted by everything I did and didn’t do, and I wake up and go into terrible nightmares knowing that I will eventually have it dug up and exposed out to the public by someone, or someone that I hurt in the past will come back up, and I will have to answer for it, for all of it….and I’ll forever be followed around by these critics with clipboards and a reel of questions and demands.
I often dream of disappearing. Disappearing from all records, disappearing from everyone’s lives. Isolating myself from the rest of humanity and living alone and worry-free in an isolated cabin or island or something for the rest of my life. I know I would go insane from isolation and die from suicide or untreatable diseases or whatever, but at least it would be better than dying in the middle of an eternal chase against The Question: Why?.
Do you see why I’ve lost trust? Even communities that claim to accept people like me, that claim to care….always turn away and fail me, and start to accuse, when it is time to really prove it, when shit gets tough for me. They start to cover up their own issues and insecurities and myriad of mind diseases with an endless wheel of accusations and exposés and Google Docs and more cheap cop-outs…..all just because it was a big lie. Nobody really cares. As Son House said, “the best friends have to part”. Even those who have told me they care about me have often just…left me suddenly, without explanation, once it was convenient for them. Or, suddenly rip violently away from me and leave a mound of lost friendships, rumors, and accusations behind them. Zaydeon knows what he did to me.
It just feels so weird to experience all this pain, every single fucking day….and then be made to feel guilty for even feeling it and trying to talk about it. It always turns into a tense, uncomfortable conversation, where I feel like I’m walking on eggshells trying not to accidentally say the wrong thing and somehow make it escalate.
To Zaydeon: Thanks for nothing, fuck you very much, have a terrible day, I wish you unhappy holidays, and I hope you drown in shit.
