Becoming Myself

I wish I could tell you the story of how I saved someone, or how I overcame some unusual hurdle by being the best version of me, but I can't. Anybody looking in on my life from the outside would certainly see a happy, healthy, intelligent person with perfect confidence in himself. Hell, even my own mother still tells me she wishes I could be that person again, but truthfully I don't think I was ever that person. This story will come with a trigger warning for self harm and suicide, but also tells of how things got better.

In my grade school years I was always a tomboy, and I hated dresses and dolls. Classic future trans man, right? Save that thought for later. The real problems I had had nothing to do with my identity. I had a much larger problem, I couldn't keep friends. I didn't have a real best friend until 6th grade, and then they moved away that summer. After that, didn't have any close friends again until 10th grade. I always thought that I was unlikable, or that people didn't want to hang out with me because I was fat or because I was a girl, or because I was intimidating. To tell you the truth, for grade school at least I still don't know what the reason was. I made friends all the time, just couldn't keep them. So now picture this: you're a girl who deep down inside would rather be a boy, you're overweight and despite all the diets your mother puts you and sports you play you cannot get any thinner, the first close friend you've ever made in the 12 years of your life is moving across the continent, and you're about to fall into a deep depression. Basically you're going to be doing good to save yourself, and sometimes that's all you can really do.

Middle school is that awkward time in, let's face it, everyone's lives, and really it wasn't so bad for me. It was like the period of time where you're trying to keep from drowning but you're too tired to keep your head above water but you haven't started drowning yet. It was okay. I had two friends, but given the choice between the other and me I was never hung out with, and I had sports and things to keep me busy.

High School is where shit really hit the fan. I imagine you're thinking, "Well, yeah, High School is where everyone's shit hits the fan. You're not special." Sure, that may be true. And it was at first. It was much like Middle School at first, where I was just kind of coasting through life. Not too good, not too bad. Around November of 2015, my 9th grade year, my two friends from Middle School drifted away from me and I lost contact with my friend from 6th grade, and I tried cutting the back of my hand just once. Just to see what other people got out of it. I didn't get anything out of it. My mom asked if I did it for the "attention."

Side note, don't ever ask someone if they are self harming for attention. Most often it is because someone is hurting so bad on the inside that they need to feel some of it on the outside. It's okay to not understand, but please just know that self harm is never the worst thing someone can do when they have depression.

I think the real reason I cut myself about 5 or 6 total times more, was not so much that I was hurting inside and needed to feel the pain on the outside, but that I felt absolutely nothing inside and wanted to feel something. Anything. And I wanted the scar to be a reminder of how empty and alone I felt so that no matter where I was mentally and emotionally, if I had even one friend or one thing to keep me going, I was doing better than I was when I left those marks. I think it's because of the latter reason that I'm not ashamed of the scars either, rather proud that I'm still alive to see them.

The summer of 2018 was a really bad time for me. I had just spent one year at the local college, having recognized that the High School was making me miserable and leaving was the best thing, but by the end of the one year I was back to feeling miserable. I was going to school, and coming home so exhausted just from having to exist that I would lay on my floor, too tired to even climb into bed, and sleep until I had to go to work. My parents would argue and I just couldn't handle all the noise so I cleaned out a corner of my tiny closet so I could have a small, dark, quiet place to curl up and pretend I was elsewhere. It had gotten to the point where I would look at a bottle of pills and wonder how many it would take to kill me in my sleep that night, and driving home I would pass large trees and consider just swerving into it. A week of Girl Scout Camp was approaching, and being one of the few remaining highlights of my life at the time I had decided that I would go to camp and just end it all after. Seem a bit dramatic? Sure, but keep in mind, at this time I had no friends, I had severe depression, my parents fought all the time, and my mother seemed to be doing everything she could to give me an eating disorder. I was miserable and felt like I wasn't going to be going anywhere, ever. I was lucky this week however, because through being LGBTQ+ I made 5 new close friends. This saved me right then and there, because it was at that point that I decided to keep trying.

Unfortunately, and you can probably see where this is going, a couple of those friendships didn't last too long. Some did, but the first friend left the moment she got a boyfriend, about a year after we all became friends. This hurt more than the others, because I really cared and was always trying to reach out, but when the time came she revealed that she had no care for any of us. The second, after about 3 years, just drifted apart from me. They're still friends with the rest of the group, but the two of us haven't actually spoken in months. One hasn't spoken to anyone in the group but me for about a year. But this is all okay, and I'm okay now, and I still care for all these people.

The reason that I'm okay after all this time, is because this group saved me, and gave me the strength to make one final grab at the light and I made it. About 3 months after that week at camp I saw a doctor and got medication to take for my severe depression. A lot of people will say "oh, but on the meds you're not your real self." I hate this argument, because medicated me is just the same as pre-depression me, and without the meds I wanted to take all the pills in my room at once so I wouldn't have to wake up the next day and face the crushing loneliness and helplessness I felt. I had no motivation whatsoever, and wouldn't have made it through college without my meds. So sure, some people can do just fine with just exercise and diet, but some people need medication as their stepping stone to even peel themselves off of the fucking floor to get outside and make the choices to eat right. Before I got my meds, I was laying on the floor between school and work because I couldn't do anything else, and the week my meds kicked in I cleaned my entire room and built a table. The difference for me was night and day. And this also was my stepping stone to college, because with my deep darkness I just wanted to take a year off of school and figure it out from there, but as soon as I got better I applied for the Biomet program across state and I'm succeeding. I found more friends through the PRIDE club in a new city, and while that group has also thinned out, I've got a few I'm close to, and I have the confidence to keep going, because my journey is not yet over.

So what I want you to take away from this is not that all sad people want to die or that all they need is to be medicated and they'll be cured. I'm still not cured, I'm just better. Everyone has their highs and lows. What I want you to take away from this, is that just a little bit of kindness can go a very, very long way. The choice to befriend someone who seems a little lonely can be the difference in whether or not they live to see another day. This isn't to say you should be friends with insufferable people, because you have to think about your own mental health first. Just listen to the people in your life when they need you to, and give the a kind word in return.