Someday

I was told I’d be someday happy…or even comprehend what happiness meant. For right now…I need to share my story. I need to let strangers know before I can explain it to my own family and friends, why I tried to kill myself.

You might know me…or know someone like me. That ‘perfect’ kid from the ‘perfect’ family. The one that has just about everything going for her. I was the top student in my school, class president, valedictorian, NHS president and so many more things. I was the girl that ruled the school in a sense…I was looked up at and put on a pedestal I felt like I didn’t deserve. Since my memory allows, I was pushed to this perfection by my ambitious parents to reach my potential but to also satisfy their own thirst for vengeance for falling before they could have made it. I could have snapped, rebelled…not given into their domain, but I wanted, desired, my parents’ love and affection and I only got that through this ‘perfection’ I was attempting to mirror.  Don’t judge me based on this. Many people do not know what daemons those idols you see posses, and many ignore them when they see someone like me falling.

But mommy and daddy never gave me affection so I sought it out from boys. I used boys to get what I wanted but never truly got it. To them I was the trophy girlfriend whereas they were to me a mirroring escape of my reality. I feel sorry now for using them when I had no right to use them…but I was a desperate girl begging for love in which ever way it came.

It was my senior year when I snapped and tried to take my life away. I met him, my first ‘true’ love in January. We were both participants at a seminar on youth leadership. We clicked right away, it was as if we were the two halves to one broken whole. Quickly, our friendship escalated to a romance that broke me in the end. He was the prince charming cloaking away his devil. I didn’t see how he was breaking me further then what I was already broken. I thought this was love anyways, I saw the repetitions of it in my own family. When he broke up for me because of another girl, a ‘better’ girl than me…I lost every will to keep going. It was the earthquake that cause the tsunami of emotions. It was as if every insult my parents had ever hurled at me was true. That I wasn’t worthy of anything because I wasn’t perfect…that there was somebody out there more perfect than me and that that person should be their child and not me.

That day, I came home from the break up and found my dad’s gun and pulled the trigger to my stomach. I wanted to feel pain, to allow myself to wallow in every single emotion I had been forced to suppressed by the dementia of my family. The euphoria of finally being over with a life I hated…with the pain I had been trying to cope with all my life, never allowed me to realize that someone else was home. All I could care about was the joy of feeling pain for once. But my  grandmother had different ideas. I remember her running into the room screaming, crying and begging me to stay alive until the ambulance came. I should have been happy someone cared enough to try to save me…but she was ruining my bliss…she was keeping me tethered to a life I didn’t want.

My misfortune became the beginning to this long road of recovery.  I will never truly ‘get over it’. I tried to end my life after all. But…I am coping now and slowly putting away the front I had been forced to have.

Please know…that surviving is good. It’s painful to accept pain but, please, don’t make my mistake of trying to end my life. There are people…somewhere…that want you to live, to see the beauty in life. I am now one of those people. I still see the darkness before the light but someday I’ll be able to see the lightness of living and embrace it. Someday, I’ll understand love, happiness and such. And today is just another day in that journey.