What are you looking for?
Featured Topics
Select a topic to start reading.
If you are in crisis and need immediate help, please call 1-800-273-8255 (NSPL) or text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line). More resources.
I never understood what people meant before when they talked about the numbness you feel when you're depressed, how things just kind of slip by you and time moves in weird ways. But now that I'm nearing the end of the worst summer of my life to date, I feel like I've been asleep for ages.
It all kicked off in July, when my parents were away on holidays. Things hadn't been going well for me for a good while before that, but that week was my crowning disappointment, because I tried to host an Epic Party in my empty house, and most of the guests that bothered to show up were my sister's friends, who I had begged her to invite to bulk up numbers. When I came back to the messy, post-party house after the few guests were herded into town, I thought about how if I killed myself, I wouldn't have to worry about cleaning up the mess the next morning.
After that party, I wasn't meeting my friends, because I didn't know who I could trust anymore, so the only human beings I was interacting with were the people in the hotel where I part-time as a waitress. I remember walking to work one early morning and wondering what would happen if I just kept walking and didn't stop, past the hotel and on into the country until I just collapsed. What difference it would make. Catching sight of the nearby lake, all misted over, I thought how comforting it would be to just weigh myself down and drop into its depths.
The only people who would really be affected, I thought, and that was what gave me pause, were my parents. I thought how selfish it would be to drag them back early from their holiday, how horrible it would be for them to come home to a dead daughter, and spend the rest of their lives blaming themselves for leaving her alone. It would crush them, I knew that, but they were the only ones who really cared, who really saw me.
I found it particularly distressing, after coming to that conclusion, when my supervisor came up to me later at the hotel and asked if I was cold, walking in to work so early with no jacket. He had passed me on his way in, when I was thinking of just walking and never stopping. His concern, in a world that seemed so entirely unconcerned with my feelings, made me want to cry. I could barely respond at all, I was so moved.
I took some steps to recover after that week, removing myself from social media, telling my closest friends that I would be in absentia for a while, giving up drinking. I considered deferring my college course for a year and working instead, since work seemed to be the only thing that was going well for me - going never better at that point, actually, as if my numbness had somehow contributed to my becoming a more efficient cog in the wheel of hospitality. Eventually I decided against that, if nothing else because of the endless questions and comments it would prompt from my parents. Better to get the next three years over with as soon as possible, I reckoned, though the length of such a period was almost unbearable, considering that so recently I had looked forward to being the one to end the pain, before my life got any worse.
My uncle's birthday dinner (attendance mandatory) fell at the end of that hellish week, and there I realised just how impaired my judgement had lately been, in regarding my parents as the only ones who would really be affected if I was gone. I had forgotten about my cousin who loves talking to me about movies.
Thoughts of my funeral came to me frequently during that time, and I found myself indulging in the imaginings of my former classmates' shock and guilt when they heard that I ended my own life, the partial responsibility they might feel, the weepy songs that would likely be played - and then it hit me, for the first time. How much they - even my family - would get wrong in their representation of me. How, as the days and weeks flew by, people's memories of me would become more and more distorted, until I was almost unrecognisable - because they never really knew me. No one really knows me yet.
And as long as I can keep proving them wrong, I should keep going.
If you see a comment that is unsupportive or unfriendly, please report it using the flag button.
More Posts
-
I dont know what to do anymore..
So it all started like a month ago, i was up late and thats where everything got f*cked up. I had passed out. And when my mom wanted to go to the toilet, she sa...
-
I WANT to be an Addict
I have horrible, horrible anxiety. Panic attacks, the works. Weed has become legal in my state, and I've found that it really, really helps. I've been smokin...