World Suicide Prevention Day

The time of life is short; to spend that shortness basely were too long.

William Shakespeare

*TRIGGER WARNING: I talk about suicidal thoughts in this post.* Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. I contemplated writing this post today, because I’ve been struggling with my mental health recently. But this day is important to a lot of people, including me, so I’ll write. 2 years ago, I was at the lowest point in my life. Truthfully, I didn’t want to be here anymore. I struggled with those thoughts for months. It was terrifying. I wasn’t myself. The constant thought in my head was “how can I live the rest of my life this way?” That’s all I thought about 24/7. I was so lost, so confused, so hurt. You want the really honest truth? I almost did it. I came pretty close. I was probably just a few weeks away from shattering my whole family’s entire world. I’m so glad I didn’t. My family realized how bad I was doing, and intervened before it was too late. They got me in with a therapist, and then a psychiatrist. I was put on medication. I truly improved so much. And since then I’ve been doing really good. But within the last 6 weeks, I feel my depression pulling me back in. I’m trying so hard to keep my head above water, but some days it feels impossible. I’m nowhere as bad as I was 2 years ago. It’s normal for depression to come and go. It just really, really sucks. I’m thankful that I’m able to talk to my therapist every week, and I’m incredibly thankful for the coping mechanisms that I have been given. But I still struggle. The bottom line is I just feel sad. I feel anxious. I feel detached from reality some days. Sometimes I feel like I’m outside of my body watching myself live my life. My therapist says I’m disassociating, All I know is how I feel. I know I’ll be okay, because I’m strong as hell. And I have so much to live for. I’ll throw in a quick line from Us Against You by Frederik Backman, “sometimes people have to have something to live for in order to survive everything else.” I agree with that wholeheartedly. What do I live for? my family, my friends, my dog, my jobs, the Penguins and everything else in between. Because I would have been gone a long time ago if I didn’t have those things. Throughout this whole journey I’ve never had a problem with being vulnerable. I’ve been second guessing that recently. I have been scared to be vulnerable. I don’t really know why. Maybe it’s the anxiety. Maybe it’s the depression. Maybe it’s something else entirely. I talked about it in therapy yesterday, and my therapist told me that I should write a blog post, even though being vulnerable right now is scary. She thought that if I did, and was honest about my fears, maybe I would help somebody else that’s feeling the same way. So I thought that today would be perfect. Today is a day that reminds me of how far I have come in my mental health recovery, and how far I still have to go. I’m proud to say that I am very much still a work in progress, because that means that I’m still here. And that’s something to be pretty proud of. To whoever is reading this, know that the world is a much better place because you are in it. It’s okay to not be okay, and it’s okay to need help. You matter. Mental health matters. Your mental health matters. Just stay. I’m currently reading Anxious People by Frederik Backman (yes the author of my favorite book that I always quote). I just started it, but there was one part that has really stuck with me. I think it sums up anxiety and depression and suicidal thoughts pretty well. “Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn’t feel like its ours. Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don’t know how, because it’s so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up. Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight, but which felt like the only way out at the time.” Please just stay. If I can do it, I promise that you can too.