My suicide story hopefully comes to an end…

Once upon a time she was filled with hopes and dreams and ambitions and warmth and vulnerability and unashamed honesty. She cared and she tried and she tried her best to love everyone, always hoping that maybe one day the other children would see something in her that they didn’t dislike. She was an outsider and that made her sad, but she never allowed herself to change, she stayed loyal to friends who, she later discovered and had secretly known all along, were the reason for her low social status. She knew and understood playground politics, but could never bring herself to worship the queens for long, knowing that they really were no better than her. She was wise beyond her years because, despite the naive hope and the protective shell she had encased herself in, she knew that no matter how hard she tried, the other children would never want to know her. She was shy as well, strangely so, because deep down she knew how strong she was. She didn’t really know how to talk to many of her peers and so often avoided doing so, sometimes preferring to be shunned and ignored entirely if it kept her from having to speak. She liked to make up stories and draw pictures and once even won a competition at school for a christmas card design, she also read a lot, always either compulsively reading a new book, or rereading something she had loved. When she was nine, she read the first six Harry Potter books and wanted so badly to be a witch, secretly hoping for a letter when she turned  eleven. Eleven had seemed like such a big age to her once, so had ten. She had been excited to reach double figures, but was more excited to one day be a teenager. She had all these ideas of what her teenage life might be like but, nearly eight years later, very few became a reality. She believed in fairies and magic and in promises and people, she loved the Disney Princesses and had some strange conviction that someday her prince would come. So far, her prince has proved elusive, although a part of her seventeen year old self can’t help but wonder if her prince is, in fact, one of the few boys who hadn’t been mean to her at primary school, who had been the Ron to her Hermione at a Harry Potter party when she was ten years old.

Regardless, that girl grew up to be seventeen and filled with strange thoughts and odd feelings and memories that she still has yet to make sense of. That girl began to experience things her ten year old self knew nothing of and had never anticipated…

Leaving primary school and starting at secondary school broke something inside of her, she became so painfully shy and almost entirely invisible, she felt worthless and overlooked and was somehow okay with that, she felt like the way she was now was the way she deserved to be. At thirteen, things began to change a little and she made some more friends, she wasn’t as shy but she was still relatively invisible. And she was still okay with that. And she still didn’t know why. She had yet to think hard about anything, really. Things were the way they were and she accepted it. She deserved it after all, and she had a future… School wouldn’t last forever and maybe one day she would be somewhere new, somewhere she truly belonged. That hope had yet to be extinguished. That girl spent her fourteenth year trying to be someone she wasn’t, her fifteenth year realising that maybe she might be on the brink of being accepted and liked and new, and her sixteenth year was spent wishing she was dead.

What brought it on specifically, she’d never know for certain, but nonetheless her thoughts were dangerously dark and she kept them all to herself. She was tired and she felt trapped in the town that had once been the whole world. Before long, she felt as though she was entirely trapped in the whole world, like wherever she went she’d never be free. That scared her more than she was ever able to articulate in her writing. She found it hard being at a train station without imagining jumping in front of a train and suicide methods occupied a fair amount of her thinking time. Not a day would pass when she didn’t think about destroying herself, when she wouldn’t think of suicide as the solution to any problem experienced, no matter how trivial. She usually felt so painfully numb that she couldn’t make herself care about anything or feel anything or care for anything, as a result it was difficult to find the energy or inclination to move most of the time. Some days were worse than others, there were occasions when she’d go out in the pouring rain hoping to feel something only to be numbed further by the cold. She felt stuck, like unless she ended it now, this was all her life would ever be and could ever be.

In an apathetic haze, she drifted through exams she had not studied for and couldn’t find it within herself to care about. She forced smiles and laughter and nostalgia as she went through the motions of finishing secondary school. Occasionally, the nostalgia was real and she couldn’t help but wonder how disappointed her ten year old self would be in the way she was now. She had stopped hoping and dreaming and seeing good in people and in the world, she didn’t believe in anything anymore and she had stopped drawing and writing and reading. She was nothing, really, and that simply reinforced the notion that her life meant nothing at all. And it didn’t. Not to her, not at that stage. She felt nothing, she did nothing and she was nothing. And nobody knew. Nobody at all knew what it was she was thinking or feeling or planning. And she liked it that way. The plans became slightly more detailed, she’d leave a letter and, if she explained herself properly, her family would understand and would be okay with it, would grow to see it was a good thing, would be happier without her. She wanted to disappear so badly, she wanted to be gone entirely from the world and her death would be good for everybody, especially her.

But there must have been something stopping her. Because she didn’t. She wanted to, but she knew even then that she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. She wanted to cease to be, but she didn’t want to be a corpse. There was something about being a corpse that bothered her, it didn’t seem dead enough. Being a corpse wouldn’t make her disappear and disappearing was something she craved more than death. She’d forgotten her younger self, really, she was so different and so strange and so, in her words back then, so broken.

She continued like this until the last few months of her sixteenth year. Things began to change slowly. She would never know precisely what had changed, but sometimes put it down to the right song at the right time, the right friends, the right conversations, the right detachment, the right books- all of these rights somehow gradually managed to change her mindset. She began to find the light again and saw that she wasn’t as lost and trapped as she’d thought she was. That, if she wanted, she could change her life and herself in a second. So she did that. She realised that it was time she started taking care of herself, looking out for herself, being kind to herself. So she was. She treated herself with care and respect and the right amount of tough love, she was able to put things into perspective and stop herself before she went into declines. She was able to remind herself of all the beauty in the world and the promise in the future and the strength within herself. And slowly but surely she began to recover.

She is now almost halfway to eighteen and has mental and physical scars and is unsure of how much of her sixteenth year she ought to tell people about. She worries about talking about it sometimes, thinking that maybe the people in her life ought to know where her head was this time last year, but then she realises that it doesn’t matter. The person she was then only matters in the sense that it brought her here, it lead her to become the person she is today. The person she is today isn’t entirely alright, and she does fear that the darkness might return, but she hopes that there will come a day when she’s living in the light that she knows is in her future and is often in her present too. She lives for the nights when it all makes sense, the days when laughter is the best medicine and the moments when she knows she is entirely not alone, when the world is beautiful and she knows she is too. She isn’t the person she expected to be when she was ten years old, and she’s fallen short of what she’d hoped for herself so many times. But that doesn’t matter, because she is more than the person she had once imagined being. She is strong and she is independent and she is loving and she is brave and she will be okay and will go on to do amazing things. She believes in the beauty within herself and the beauty within all of us, she knows that nothing will ever be easy, but that she is willing to fight for the imperfections that make this life so possible. She vows to try to keep away the monsters and to show her Ron Weasley, how much he means to her. She vows to be more than the person she ever imagined being and she vows to live a beautiful life which she will be proud of.

 

This is the current final version of my suicide story and this hopefully marks the ultimate end of my struggles with the darkest of all thoughts. Somehow I made it out and I hope that you will too.