I hate living but I’m too afraid to die. I hate myself for it.

Hi, I’m HangedKiller, and this is my story.

Obviously, HangedKiller is not my real name. I don’t know why I’m talking about this on the internet, but there’s something screaming inside of me.

I attempted suicide by hanging the summer of 2009.

Asian families have no room for your opinions or your dreams. I became accustomed to the ‘sit down and shut up’ routine.

Becoming used to being nothing is so horrible.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t live up to their expectations. No matter how much I lived for their ideals, it started falling apart in sophomore year of high school. I was a 4.0 student until then, and then depression hit and I started getting B’s. Then C’s. And then D’s and F’s. I couldn’t see what I was good for. I wasn’t stellar at Piano. I wasn’t going to be an academic valedictorian. I was ashamed of myself. I thought I was worthless. I started cutting in the beginning of sophomore year. I hated my cowardly self, how lonely I felt, how restricted I felt, how much I hated Christianity, how hopeless I felt. My future as the filial asian daughter was to study hard, go to a great college, get a Ph.D, and be some professor or researcher  with equally successful children. I DIDN’T WANT THAT. But I couldn’t say anything. My grades and my depression were inversely related. One spiraled down as the other escalated. I lost my grasp on life. When report cards came out, I hid it for weeks. I tore it up and threw it away.

When I could no longer avoid the truth, I waited until my mom and dad were out of the house. I looped a belt around a stair rail and tried to hang myself.

It didn’t work.  (obviously) I was caught.

I survived, and everything about my grades came out to my parents. Even then, I couldn’t communicate with them what was wrong. A week later, they were acting like everything was back to normal. Besides my abysmal grades, they acted like nothing had ever happened. I have never received counseling, and I still cannot tell them anything. My world views are vastly different from theirs, but I play the role of the good daughter and do as they say.

I continued to cut. My parents still don’t know. I cut open old cuts to prevent wide regions of scarring. I have been cutting for three years, and they still don’t know.

Because of my grades from sophomore year, I basically redid my whole second semester while taking all my classes for junior year. It was a double courseload. I couldn’t keep up, and my grades only drifted back up to B’s and C’s. This continued all through the rest of high school. I scraped my way into a decent college, but it was a huge disappointment to my parents. I wasn’t in Berkeley or Harvard or MIT or even Cornell. My parents couldn’t show their faces in front of their friends. On my birthday, my mom cried and screamed that I should have died. I felt guilty for wasting my parents efforts and time.

Three years after my suicide attempt, I still cut. It’s not that serious. It’s just methodical; slicing open the same old wounds. I hug that same belt at night sometimes, feeling the cold metal and dreaming of death. I still hate myself. I still want to die everyday. I lost the one person that I could lean on, and now I can’t tell anyone how lost and alone I feel. I was supposed to be all better. They all want to pretend it never happened.

I want to die. But I’m afraid. I’m a failure. I can’t even die properly. I’m wasting my parents money by going to college. I’m a waste of space. I should have died three years ago. These thoughts multiply and I crumble everyday. I don’t cry anymore when I cut. Living with the depression and hatred of myself has become the twisted way I live. Why can’t I die? I don’t want to hope.

I should have died.