I’d Rather Not Break My Mom’s Heart But I Want To Die

I am a seventeen year old in my third year of high school. I go to a therapeutic high school, but my attendance is pretty erratic due to my depression, anxiety, mood disorder NOS, insomnia, and sensory issues. I fit the tortured poet cliche. I am recognized for my poetry regionally, which I cherish because it seems to be my only accomplishment in life. I am quite useless in every other endeavor (though I do have a talent for making up decent drinking songs).

I have been struggling with mental illness since the age of ten, though I was only diagnosed when I was twelve. Since that time, I have been immersed in the world of psychiatric treatment. I take medication and go to therapy, and have been doing so for five years. While I have made immense progress and am in a much better space than I was, I still struggle, and it seems to be that my body and mind are very tired of it. I was recently hospitalized for month because of my strange sleeping patterns (I was completely nocturnal for two months prior), suicidal ideations, and general instability. This was not my first hospitalization.

My family is strained.

Before I was ten, my mother yelled at me for the silliest things and used to hit me to discipline me. It was a horrible situtation- my mother had PTSD and was unable to cope. While she was hitting me she would insist she hated doing it and that she did it because she loved me. My father, when he was employed, spent a lot of time away from home, often going on business trips and leaving me to her mercy. Neither one realized that my mother was actually being abusive. I hated her for many years, and from time to time feelings of resentment take over my opinion of her. My mother is a pitiful thing, and she tends to whine whenever she is the slightest bit upset, so I usually find it in my heart to move on.

My father is an aristocrat fallen from grace. His family was very wealthy and very prestigious, but the actions of his siblings have drained all the money away. He seems to retain the attitude of an aristocrat, though, which is eternally frustrating. He is emotionally abusive, misogynistic, and so convinced that he is in the right that there seems to be no hope of change. In the opinion of the therapist my parents when to couple therapy for, he has schizoid personality disorder. For the most part, he stays in his office and plays video games all day. It has been this way for nearly six years now. I am the only one in the family who stands up to him, mostly because I am the only one who inherited his cunning enough to contend with him. In a recent family therapy session, he confessed he is afraid of speaking to me because of my wrath. In reality, he has zero emotional intelligence and doesn’t seem to recognize his wrong doing, so my retaliation is unpredictable in his eyes. He almost never talks to me.

I have two close friends with whom I have healthy and fulfilling relationships with. My disposition is cheerful enough that I get on with most people I encounter, but I have always been tentative to make new friends. I don’t have much patience for dishonesty or putting up a front, which I contribute to my complete inability to lie. One of my friends is as straightforward as I am, and the other is easy going enough that they don’t mind.

I am a upper middle class teen living in a nice house on a beautiful property living with people I love and whom love me in return. I like myself and I have many opportunities is life not everyone else has. All of these things I recognize and appreciate.

Now that I have described my situation in life (long winded as it is but I want you to understand me beyond my illness), I can get on to my problem.

I have exhausted all the resources available to me in my efforts to be healthy and happy. I have gone through all the appropriate medications, therapies, and various methods of improving my quality of life. I have done this all faithfully for years, and I have come to the point where I feel that my depression is too great to overcome. Granted, I’ve felt like this before, but at the point I’m at now I have no other idea what the hell I am supposed to be doing to be happy.

I feel so old and tired of my mental illness. I don’t know what to do. At the moment I am reluctant to kill myself because it would break my mother’s heart. I could never do that to her. But it is not a solid enough encouragement to prevent me from some dramatic impulse (I am both impulsive and ridiculously dramatic). I doubt I would seek death out, but my mother wants to visit a certain part of the east coast that has cliffs that I know I could be easily convinced to throw myself off of <-dramatic.

If any of you have an idea of what to do please let me know because my life is pretty nice and I’m sure I’d do splendidly if I could shake this whole constant intense depression spiel I got going on.

Thank you, and take care of yourselves.

All good vibes,

Bo