I tried to kill myself. It didn’t work. I keep wondering… was I even close?
Why is it up to someone else to determine what is right for my life? Why is it up to others to tell me that it’s wrong for me to want to die? It’s a conflict of interest when family says it’s selfish for me to try to kill myself. If I’m in pain, isn’t it selfish of them to ask me to stay, to spare them from pain?
Mine is only one life. I want to go out as inconsequentially as a candle. People who don’t speak to me or spend time with me in my painful moments tell me I have to stay. It’s what they need, it’s what they want… but if they aren’t interested, they can’t be bothered to give their time to me, would they even notice if I was gone? This reminds me of my incessant need to shop and inability to throw away purchases I’ve neverused.
I’ve heard it said that people who think about suicide aren’t necessarily going to kill themselves. When people decide to kill themselves they are often calm or at peace. This is what I felt. A sudden peace, knowing that this is what was right.
Afterward, I only regretted it not working. I may have been at peace or perhaps was so detached from the event that I had very little feelings toward it. Leaving this world was going to be harder than I thought.
I didn’t want to face my boyfriend. He kept asking to see me and I kept making excuses. When I tried to cancel on him for the millionth time in the course of three days, he called me out. I let him come. I left the door unlocked and lay in bed. When he entered my room I looked at him, emotionlessly.
I couldn’t bare to hold the weight of his pain. I rolled over uninterested and detached from his feelings. Why didn’t how I felt matter.
He climbed into bed and held me and cried.
It took me a few days but suddenly it hit me. If he had tried to kill himself, how would I feel?
I do not let happinesses’ warm fingers caress my face like sunlight. I do not let it unthaw my soul. I trained myself long ago to believe that happiness will always be taken away one day. Too much happiness means a lot of pain is looming in the background.
The TV show This is Us, has an episode in which Randal says that the need to meet his birth-parents is like a constant ringing in his ears. Sometimes it’s quieter and sometimes it’s louder but it is always there. I have swaddled this metaphor and held it close to my heart because it encapsulates so much of what I feel. Through every fun conversation, behind every smile and vibrating in my mind amidst every giggle is the thought that I will be unhappy again. That black hole of nothingness and numbness will swallow me up once more. It has come to the point that happiness feels like a tease. It’s like a joke played on myself by depression. “Here feel something” it smirks, a frozen wasteland, letting me taste sunlight, only to wrap me and suffocate me in its cold embrace once more.
Happiness terrifies me. It begs me to trust it. It tempts me with its warmth and comfort. It tries to befriend me but I cannot take its hand.
I came to a point in my life where I gave up on trying to be happy for other people. I gave my family a glimpse into what I felt on the inside. The energy it took to keep up my facade, had escaped me. I sat on the couch for hours, not moving, staring, unresponsive as if I was brain-dead. I did this for days at a time. Moving from one place to the other just staring–not faking smiles or interest when it wasn’t there.
I had told my parents previously that I needed help. After years of silence. After years of both of us ignoring an obviously critical problem I asked for help. They completely ignored me. I don’t mean they brushed me off and told me I was fine. I don’t mean they mocked me. I don’t mean they said I just wanted attention. I mean they said nothing. As if I’d imagined myself speaking they responded with silence. I said it again: “I think I have depression. I need help.” As if they hadn’t heard me they began a new conversation with each other. I cried silently for the rest of the hour and a half drive home and neither of them said a word to me.
Once my mom got to see how little I could really care about my relationships, conversation, life, work, sleep, being awake, anything… and once she realized how much of my life I faked, she quickly went from ignoring my cry for help to believing I was not sane.
After I dropped out of university and lived at home unemployed barely ever leaving my house, my mom and I ran into the mother of one of my old friends. She asked me how I was and my mother witnessed me smile and laugh and charm her into believing my life was fantastic, I’d made amazing choices, I couldn’t be happier. I’ve never seen my mom look so scared. I think she finally realized how good I’d become at faking it. It: wanting to exist. I think she finally started asking herself the right questions: ‘How long has my daughter been fooling me? Why would she hide her true feeling from me for so long?’
Absently Searching 