I Want to be Alive

I have been alive for a little over 15 years  now.  I’ve laughed countless times, smiled the majority of my life, and cried when it seemed appropriate.   Yet I’ve rarely done any of these with emotion.  I’ve been alive for over a decade and a half but I can’t think of a single time when I was truly living.

I started to realize that I was empty, and that emptiness was suffocating.  It was a tangible force, crushing me to the ground like gravity.  I wanted to feel something…  maybe love or at even agony, just anything but this hollowness inside of me.  I want to be able to sleep at night, to feel hungry and not just eat for the sake of it.

There’s a desperate need to be normal when I inquire my friends if they’ve ever felt this way,  and my upperclassmen too.   But then I know I’m not.  I’m not normal.  I’m not everybody.  While some strive to be different, I just am and I don’t want to be.  It makes me feel ostracized and suspicious of everyone, paranoid.  It makes it hard for me to relate to others and then I start to pretend that I’m happy again so that I blend in with the crowd.  I go back to my regular old smile after maybe a day or two of brooding like this except its this superficial smile that’s crushing me and then I go ahead and do it anyways until all I see in a face is a mask.

I know I should be happy, truly from the depths of my heart, but I don’t even know if I have an emotional heart;  I can’t love things and appreciate them.  I know that there people who care about me and love me, but I always have my doubts.  I can’t openly tell anyone about this, because then I’m labelled as an outcast, depressed, suicidal, and I’ll have to go see shrinks and crap.  I want a way out  of this cycle of emptiness and superficiality.  I want to be able to honestly say that I lived during my teenage years.  I want to be able to love and be loved without doubting anyone.

I’ve  begun cutting myself, or running until I’m barfing, and doing drugs, all for the fake adrenalin rush I get, even when I know that its probably not a good idea.  Everyday I’m just secretly running my life into the ground just because of this emptiness, which anyone would blame on teenage angst as soon as they know I’m a teen.  And I understand because I also just thought of this as teenage angst in the beginning.  But I’ve kept these thoughts bottled up for over a year already and even my mind is starting to feel numb now.  I don’t want this numbness and endless apathy.  I want to be alive.

So that’s why I’m writing this.  To remind myself that I want to be alive, and I have to be alive.  So that I don’t forget that and truly venture into suicide, which I have already contemplated  several times.