I am the good type of suicidal

For namesakes, my name is Alex. That is not my first name, but it is half of my middle name. It feels better to put a name to this. I am 19 years old, I weigh about 110 pounds, and I am 5 foot 6 inches tall, and I’m skinny. These are the traits I credit as the roots of all my insecurities. I want to make this very personal, as there I things here I have never told anyone ever before, but wont put my actual name on the off chance that someone I know sees this and recognizes my name.

Up until my sophomore year in high school, I was blessed with ignorance, innocence, whatever you want to call it, from social pressures, things like that. I did what I wanted, and I guess you could call me somewhat of a middle school bully. It wasn’t that I had insecurities I was trying to offset, I merely offended people because I didn’t know what I was saying, and how it affected people. But I had a good time in middle school. My childhood was fine, it was great even. There isn’t anything deep down inside me that was buried there from an early point in my life that is causing me to feel the way I am feeling now.

My depression started my sophomore year in high school. I noticed my friends were changing. I had begun to recognize why they were changing, doing things to fit in with groups they wanted to hang out with, saying things that would earn them a place of value among people they thought were cool. Societal pressures that many teens consider laws in high school had entered my life. The birth of my depression was a result of the realization of how short I was compared to my classmates. The main reason this bothered me was because of how hard it was to find a girlfriend. At this point in my life (I was 15), I was starting to look for people to begin a relationship with, and it was nearly impossible to grab the attention of a girl I found attractive, because of my height, my size, and my lack of confidence.

This had began about the 2nd half of my sophomore year, and went on to last my entire junior year. I remember coming back after summer break into junior year, and the usual ecstatic feeling of reuniting with friends, had been replaced with feelings of apprehension, introversion, and feelings of just wanting to go home and sleep. As the year went on, these pressures, now stacked with the stress of worrying about what college did I want to start thinking about, further deepened my depression. I wasn’t keeping up with my schoolwork. I would fall behind in class and instead of trying to catch up, it would just seem so much easier to go to sleep and not have to think about it. I spent the year wishing I was home every single school day. I began to have very angry fits when I was alone, when I just couldn’t keep it bottled inside anymore. It could be the littlest thing that set me off, such as dropping a folder and having pages slide everywhere, and I would launch into an intense anger fit where I would scream at the top of my lungs, cursing God for bringing this sadness upon me, blaming him for everything he’s ever done to me, and for everything I’ve ever done to myself. Sometimes it would even make me angrier that I let something so little affect me in such a way, and the entire thing would just snowball. I would kick walls and doors, throw things and break them, and get down on my hands and knees and scream at my highest volume capable, only exhaling screams when I needed to breathe, until there would be a puddle of drool below where my mouth was. There are dents in the walls of my house where I would bang my head, which are still unexplained to my mother, and probably never will be. These fits ALWAYS came in two phases: Extreme anger, and then extreme sadness. After screaming until my throat hurt, I would lie down, sometimes on the floor, not moving from where I had been screaming. I would sob, I never realized how pathetic I could sound until I had cried my heart out like I could only do knowing no one was there to hear me. I sounded like a hurt animal at times, and when I would hear myself cry, it would only make me feel even more defenseless. I felt like nothing, and this is when I first started to have suicidal thoughts.

My senior year, I had dome some recovering. I had suspected that I was bipolar, because my grandfather was bipolar, and I thought it might run in the family. After a discussion with my mom about my insecurities (as hard as that was), a couple of appointments and tests, it was concluded that I did not have any kind of mental disorder. Nonetheless, I had begun to accept my height for something I can’t change, and focus on my good qualities, such as my ability to make people laugh. I was feeling good, I even began dating an attractive new girl who had just moved into the area, which began my first serious relationship. My friends and I had started to mature. We were comfortable with telling each other how much the others friendship meant to us, whereas before, our friendship was more like a competition to see who could be alpha male of the group, like some kind of hierarchy. We had good times, and life seemed it had started to finally look up.

The thing with my girlfriend was, she had just broken up with her boyfriend back home, and I guess I was the rebound. I told her I would only date her if there would be no “ex” drama, and she agreed, and told me she would cut off ties with him and give herself to me so we could have a healthy relationship.  I so stupidly believed her. I have never been the “hit and quit” type of guy, probably because it was impossible for me to be such a guy (my unattractive height and size to most girls), so I fell in love with her completely. Long story short, she cheated on me many times, and being that I just wanted someone to love and confide in, I kept taking her back. I eventually broke up with her, realizing just how unhealthy she was for me. (I am now completely over her, and she is no longer to blame for my feelings of sadness.)

This made my last half of senior year hell. I went right back to being depressed, right back into my fits, right back into the pit of sadness that I had managed to climb out of before. I lost all confidence, and tried my hardest to keep to myself while maintaining whatever social status I had. Graduation came around, and what was supposed to be a monumental, happy day of my life, was just another event I didn’t want to show up to. To some in a similar boat of depression in high school, college seemed to be their way out. The ticket to a new life. To me, it was the even darker abyss of sadness on the horizon. With college, I would have to start over. I wouldn’t have friends there that I’ve know since childhood. I would have to learn to be independent.

The first semester of college wasn’t bad. I made good grades, I went to class. I learned how to be out on my own and got used to it remarkably quickly and easily, which surprised me. I didn’t really care what people though anymore, not because I wanted to have this, “I’m so bad ass because I do what I want and don’t let people stop me.” attitude, but because I knew it was unhealthy to let my social anxiety keep me from doing things that needed to be done, such as going to class, attending events, and grabbing opportunities that would benefit me on my road to a career. I would force myself to do something, and once I was there, I had no choice but to do what it was I was there to do. This mindset gradually built up some confidence, and eventually, I didn’t have to force myself to do things anymore. My second semester was terrible. I became depressed again, but not as depressed as usual. I didn’t have any kind of fits, I just wanted to sleep all the time. I ended up having to drop a few classes, but all in all, I recovered. I accepted what happened, and told myself I would do better in the future. It was not the end of the world, because I had felt worse before, so in a weird way, that thought made me feel better.

I am now in my third semester of college, and my view of life is different than most. I now sometimes get sad, but I think I’ve internally wired something in my brain to subconsciously bring my brain back to an equilibrium, and this keeps me from hitting that rock bottom feeling of depression. In the period of time where I learned to be independent, I was always thinking to myself. I’ve always enjoyed thinking. Even as a kid I remember staring out the car window, telling my sister to leave me alone with my thoughts and to quit bothering me. But in the transition from high school to college, I learned what solitude felt like. My view of death has changed. I no longer blame anything supernatural for my issues, or get angry at a higher being, because I finally lost all faith in religion. Instead, I find that it is perfectly logical that early humans created Gods in order to provide an explanation for the unexplained. It’s perfectly reasonable. But how I do wish something like that existed. I wish I was stupid, unable to comprehend these pressures. I wish I was still innocent.

I am happy now. But I don’t want to live. I realize how much of a miracle life truly is. It is truly incredible that I am even typing this right now. That you, me, and everyone around us is even alive, able to have these thoughts. Out of the trillions of planets in the universe, we are allowed life. And what of other planets with life? Do they exist? It seems reasonable that they do. But the fraction is still very small. Life seems to be so rare, that to be alive can be seen as a gift. A gift given from a God? Maybe. But I don’t think so. I don’t want to live my life knowing such pain exists. It feels like to be happy, I am only running from inevitable sadness. Everywhere I look, I see people in despair. And I want to help them, but I know I will never be able to help them all. Sadness will always exist, because without sadness, you cannot have happiness.

I am currently studying to be a children’s psychiatrist. I know it will take many years in school, but this does not phase me because I value life as something so short in comparison to the universe that I might as well pick something Ill enjoy doing if I decide not to end my life prematurely. I want to give people a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on. I will feel better knowing I made a difference to somebody.

I am not deeply sad, but I want to die. When I think of death, I do not think of it as something entirely bad anymore. When the concept of death comes to mind, I think of the unconsciousness that comes with it. I won’t be able to think of all the pain and misery in the world. Anything that would result from my death would be unknown to me because I am dead. I would be relieved from all problems. No matter what pro-life argument someone could make, it does not matter because the unconsciousness that comes with death defeats it. So what if I will miss out on having a wife, beautiful children, seeing world peace being achieved, or anything positive that the human mind can fathom. It does not matter, because whatever it is, will not apply to me once I am dead. I will never have the slightest idea that those things exist. I wont even exist. Time will disappear, and so will everything else. I will finally rest in the black nothingness that is death. I will finally be perfectly happy, in respect that there is an absence of sadness.