I gave all I could, but it left me so sore

Honey, I hear you. I *hear* you, and I see you. I know this so well.

I’m 18 as well. Last year I crashed so badly I tried to kill myself twice, cut every day (my hands were so wrecked that I couldn’t take the bandages off, and it hurt to play piano – I’m a piano major in college), only just kept from breaking down in sobs every day in class, started smoking, stopped sleeping, eating, walking, thinking. I thought, “If only I could stop breathing.” I felt like the sky was falling in on me, literally. I was having paranoid episodes. And every moment of every day, I thought of suicide. I thought of bullets in the temple and razors on my wrist and developed a particular fascination with the little soft nook at the base of the skull, wanted something sharp in there, quick and decisive. One night, I was going to drown myself in the river in my town, but it’s a good thirty-minute walk from my house and I was dizzy, lightheaded from vodka and nicotine and couldn’t make it. So I guess cigarettes and alcohol saved my life – never thought I’d hear that one.

I spent a year going slowly insane, and by the end of it, it was either hospitalization or intensive therapy-and-meds. I picked the therapy. They gave me meds. They make my arms and knees break out in awful bruises, and I’m tired more often than not, but they help me sleep and keep the madness away. I won’t say that I’m happy, but I feel like happy’s someplace I can get, someday. Which is more than I had going for me before.

Please hang in there, Johanna. I promise this will get better. Love, I promise.