Venting

I am a 22 year old male currently considering suicide. I have depression, as well as a bout of terrible luck. But I can’t die yet. Not until I’ve at least gotten to spill my guts somewhere. So I’m doing this as an experiment. I can’t vent to anyone in my close circle of friends, because I have constructed such an elaborate facade, I’m not sure if they’d even take it seriously. So I figure doing so anonymously will be just as cathartic.

My parents got divorced when I was four. It is the first memory I have. It was not a pleasant divorce, to say the least. My mother retained most of the custody, although my father eventually got a percentage of time (less than 50%). At this point, my father’s alcoholism took over. When I was nine years old, he drunkenly drove to my mother’s house and drove through the garage, in what he would later privately disclose was an attempt to kill her. My sister and I were in the rooms adjacent to hers, meaning he would have had to plow through ours before hitting hers. He acknowledged that he knew this, and would still have done so. Meanwhile, my mother remarried just after this incident. The man she married had never had children, and treated us like full grown adults. He began to verbally abuse both my sister and I, although I took the brunt of it. My mother at first tried to lessen the severity of this, but eventually joined in herself. My father not only verbally abused me, but also physically abused me. Just after my thirteenth birthday, he struck me with enough force to send me into a wall. I left, and we did not speak for nine years. In leaving my father’s residence, the verbal abuse piled on thicker than ever, until I left for college. I lied, telling my parents I was busy, and managed to avoid coming home for any extended period of time for nearly three years. But once I graduated and took a year off to work, I came back into the environment. Nothing had changed.

I always knew I was depressed, but never chose to talk to my parents about it, largely because their solution was therapy. The last two therapists they had sent me to had actually undermined my self-esteem, and I had been sent for anger management for defending myself in a fight, which made me resentful towards therapists in general. As such, I quietly let it fester, and I learned to hide it. I bottle my emotions until I cannot contain them any longer, then let them explode outwards. My friends see me smiling. I learned to do so because I was tired of people wondering why I was crying. It forced a lot of people out of my life, because when I would open up to them, they would see how deep the emotional scars ran, and how incongruous it was with their concept of who I was. I finally realized at this point that there is no compatible method of merging how I feel behind the mask with the mask itself. I’m still coping with it. I still have suicidal thoughts. I’m a recovering alcoholic. I am completely rebuilding my life from the ground up, and it is not easy. But I refuse to die until I’ve tried.

I know this seems like a PSA, and is cheesy. But for those of you out there reading it, thank you. You’re helping a suicidal young man stay alive for one more day. And that is something that I can never pay you all back for.