I Felt I Had Nothing Left

Hey y’all, I don’t really know how to begin this so I guess I’ll try and start from, well, the beginning–if I can find it.  I guess it all started when I was a sophomore in high school.  I started developing feelings of hopelessness.  Some of my friends seemed like they didn’t like me any more and I became very paranoid that they were plotting behind my back and planning to stab me in the back.  People don’t expect a girl like me to be depressed and develop suicidal tendencies.  I graduated top of my class from high school, got a scholarship to college, am a three sport athlete, middle to upper class, and I come from a good family who supports me and doesn’t intentionally hurt me.  Girls like me aren’t supposed to want to kill themselves; girls like me are supposed to be happy.  But I wasn’t.  I’m a pretty stubborn person and my parents and I didn’t have a good relationship.  My sister was always having to moderate when the situation got bad enough.  Don’t misunderstand though; they never hit me or abused me in any way.  We just didn’t get along and I believed that they didn’t care about me.  So one Friday night my parents were out and my sister was at a party–a party that I had wanted to go to but none of my friends were answering my text messages.  So I was sitting alone in my room thinking through all the scenarios of things that had happened between me and my friends over the past few weeks and I convinced myself that they were all at this party having a great laugh.  So I decided that I wanted to die.  I was going to overdose on painkillers and alcohol.  I didn’t go through with it.

My story doesn’t end there, though.  My depression worsened to the point that I began inflicting myself with burns.  Now, I sport a lovely scar on my leg from where I used to drag matches across my skin.

Then came the summer before my junior year.  I work as a lifeguard at a pool and I met a guy there.  We began talking and we really seemed to get along and he seemed to get me.  So we began dating.  I should’ve seen the signs and broken it off with him long before I finally did, but he was only my second boyfriend and I was naive.  First sign: his ex-girlfriend sent me a message laying out all the things he had done to her, warning me about it.  I shrugged it off on the thought that she was just jealous and didn’t like that I was dating her ex.  Second sign: he told me he loved me after a couple of weeks and I was too scared to not return it.  I wasn’t in love, but I was scared he was going to break up with me.  I was happy though.  I finally stopped burning myself and had opened up to him about my past and he was patient and caring about my problems.  Third sign:  he broke up with me and told me he didn’t love me anymore.  He also told me that he had cheated on me (and I knew from a misaddressed text that it was because I wasn’t “putting out”).  I wasn’t ready after only a few months, but he didn’t seem to care.  We got back together the next day because he said he didn’t know what he was thinking and that it was stupid.  And at that point he had made sure that he was pretty much the only person allowed in my life.  I had stopped hanging out with most of my friends on the weekends because I spent every moment with him, I stopped really talking to my guy friends because I knew that it would upset my boyfriend, I became even more distant from people but no one seemed to notice.  Fourth sign: we constantly fought, mostly because I still didn’t want to have sex with him.  But he made it so I felt that I had no other choice but to do other things with him, things that I didn’t want to do.  Fifth sign:  I caught him on two occasions flirting with other girls behind my back and always texting girls while we were together.  Why did I not finally call it quits?  He was all I had.  My best friend decided not to be friends with me any more and I suspect it was because I barely ever hung out with her anymore because of him.  I was with him for two years.  Two years of hell.  Sixth sign: He used my depression, and my sympathy for people who suffer from it against me.  Since we were always fighting, he told me that he was depressed and contemplating suicide.  I think it was just a ruse to force me to stay with him.  I debated many times breaking up with him, but he always seemed to manipulate me into thinking that I didn’t want to break up with him.  Seventh sign:  One night his parents weren’t home and we were hanging out at his house and of course he wanted to have sex, but I wasn’t in the mood.  He made me do it any ways and I began crying.  Afterwards he held me and apologized and said it would never happen again.  I still don’t know if what happened was rape or not, but after that night I began fighting back.  When we would get in fights, I stopped backing down all the time and stood up for myself.  I even started throwing insults back at him.  I knew my only way out of all of that was when I went to college.  We weren’t going to the same place and I was glad (although I never let him see that).  He was so excited to be going to a school close to me and he said he went there purely for me..even though I told him not to.  He told me everything he had done in the past two years had been for me and that he was so in love with me.  Now I see that it was obsession, not love that drove him.

I finally got away from him and met people who I love and care about and who love and care about me.  Depression is still with me and I still sometimes think of suicide, but knowing that I have people who really do love me keeps me going.  I still haven’t told my parents; I’m not really strong enough for that yet.  I think they suspect something and I really do want to get help.  Maybe if I get my depression treated I can finally forget about some of the things that have happened to me.  Maybe I’m not the type of person who “should” be depressed, but it can happen to anyone.  My sufferings may not seem bad by comparison to some people’s, but it was bad to me.  I hope my story helps someone see that things do get better.  Things in my life aren’t always picture perfect–I cried for the first time in 4 months and in my look for help I stumbled upon this site and it prevented me from doing something extremely stupid tonight.  So thank you.