As I write this, I am lying in my bed, in the middle of the day, for the 97th day in a row. The lights are off, food wrappers surrounding me, my phone relentlessly ringing to remind me of all the unanswered messages. None of this seems to matter to me, though. My mind is consumed with thoughts while my body is shackled with thousand pound weights. Some may call this laziness, and I understand where they are coming from. But this is depression.
I never thought that I would be in a place like this. A little over a year ago, it felt like I had it all. I graduated at the top of my class, I was first chair in the orchestra, I was voted best dressed, the homecoming queen, I had a boyfriend that loved me, and I received academic and talent scholarships to the university of my choice. I had all of those stupid things that people wanted in high school, and that made me so happy. I had struggled with an eating disorder and social anxiety previous to this, and was so proud that I had overcome it, that I never thought that I would face anything worse.
Out of anyone in the world, I was the last person that anybody would look at and think, "wow, she must have so many things to be sad about."
And the answer is, I don't.
I know I don't.
I know I am lucky for all the things that I have, and I am not looking for the pity of others.
The funny thing, though, is that depression knows that I have no reason to be sad, and yet, here I am. Here it is. We are one in the same. It is indescriminant. It doesn't care what we have and what we don't have, because honestly, none of that matters if we don't have the outlook to see it.
I don't remember the last time I was truly happy. Things with my boyfriend began slowly deteriorating over many months, which I obliviously ignored to the bitter end of the relationship. I ignored all the name calling, the belittling, the using, and the signs of cheating, because I knew that once that relationship ended, so would I. While I was right, and it may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, I had no idea that something so little as a breakup with a dillhole boyfriend could pull the middle block of my waivering Jenga tower of a life right out from under me.
By this point, the depression had been building up for months, and my Jenga tower came crashing down. My timeline of the past three months is nonexistent, and my memory is hazy at best. Self harm became a way to disengage my thoughts, as my thoughts were much scarier than the wounds I was creating on my thigh. And when I tried to stop the self harm, suicidal thoughts began to slip in.
Suicidal thoughts come slowly.
They sneak up on you.
Until one day, I drove to the lake in the flooding rain where I sat for three hours, sobbing, because I knew that I wanted walk to the edge of the dock and jump. I cried because I wasn't scared to die. And that's what scared me the most.
I haven't slept for more than a few hours a night for the past three months. Falling asleep is difficult, while staying asleep is impossible. The only dreams I have anymore are about my family members finding my self harm scars and laughing at them. If that were to happen in real life, they would honestly laugh.
When I close my eyes, images haunt me. The most prominent one is from a day where I stood in the mirror with my hands wrapped around my neck, and I saw my face turn completely purple. The eyes looking back at me weren't my eyes anymore. That wasn't my face. That was a person who had been consumed by a force unknown to most people: Depression.
That same day I tried to hang myself. I tied a scarf around my neck, stood on a chair, and hung it from the ceiling. when I stepped off the chair, the scarf was ever so slightly too long and I hung there for minutes, with my toes touching the ground, slowly choking, before I realized that I couldn't die like this. I got myself out of the noose, went to bed, and have been in bed ever since.
For those of you who are still reading, which I doubt are many, I am a well known user here, although I have been pretty inactive for the past three months. I wrote this to tell a message to all of those people who are suffering in silence with me.
You are not alone.
I know that the days are long, and it's hard to know what day it even is, let alone what time it is. I know it feels hopeless. But I don't want to die anymore. I just want to get better.
Even if you have no hope, remember that other people do. And because of that, we know that hope does exist out there somewhere. And that will be our saving grace.
To all of you who aren't suffering from depression, if you notice someone starting to pull away, don't tell them to snap out of it. Don't tell them anything. Just offer your time. Sometimes all we need is to feel important to just one person. I know that's what I want. And maybe someday I'll get that. But for now, I will just have to pick up the pieces while my family looks on, totally oblivious to the pain I'm feeling. To them, I'm lazy. And I'm fine with them thinking that. The only way they were ever going to find out how I feel was through my suicide note. And they will never see that, because I don't want to die anymore.
There is always hope.
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