Life as I Thought I Knew It (1)

I've always been a bit reluctant to share any of my experiences or stories that regard mental illness and suicide at the fear of typecasting myself as a "typical millennial" or "attention-seeking teenager," but after realizing how unhealthy it is to bottle up emotions, I have indeed decided to share my story. And to whoever feels the urge to explore it, I hope you find solace and hopefully inspiration.

I've decided that the best approach to telling this story is through small parts and installments to avoid boredom and/or frustration. This first part is just your basic introduction.

It starts off fairly the same, a person feels an overwhelming emotion and can't find a healthy coping mechanism to deal with it, or they don't realize it till too late and before they know it, they have begun a downward spiral into one of the most difficult and confusing mental wars.

When I started my freshman year of high school, I had become friends with a girl who was completely different from me. She was popular, beautiful, and confident on the outside. She claimed she was insecure and hated herself, but I couldn't bring myself to believe it. All I saw when I looked at her was what I wanted to be: beautiful in the eyes of others. So to cope with her insecurities, she would self-harm, smoke cigarettes, drink constantly, and throw herself at every boy that gave her attention. I did the former two, but once again, I couldn't bring myself to do the latter two. To me, if this beautiful girl who "had it all," especially in the looks department, viewed herself as "repulsive" and "disgusting," then what did I look like to other people?

So throughout the entire school year, anytime I ever felt angry at someone, upset at a situation, or frustrated at life, I would cut myself, or on the rare occasion when my 14-year old self would get a pack of cigarettes, I would smoke the pain away. It helped in the moment, in the midst of all the overwhelming disappointments, but I didn't know that four years later I would be regretting every decision I ever made.

You're probably wondering where my parents were in all of this. I wasn't exactly the type of kid to spill everything to my mom or cry to my dad whenever someone would hurt me. I tried to hide everything, but once my mom found out, it was over for a brief week. She talked to me for an hour one day and tried to understand, but she couldn't. In her eyes, I was a privileged teenager who got everything I ever wanted. What could possibly be so bad in my life that I felt the need to pry my own skin open? Was it because a boy didn't like me back, or some girls at school were bullying me? What was it?

The sad part is that I couldn't answer that question back then, and I can only barely answer it right now. It was too much that was happening all at once, and some days it was because nothing was happening. There were times when I was living in ecstasy and enjoying my days as a young adolescent with no cares about the future, while there were moments where reality hit me and I realized I had no future.

I thought a therapist might help me, so I convinced my mom to let me see one once the second semester of freshman year began. To me, seeing a therapist was just a show and I was a performer. I would spin tales of woe and despair, and she would counter them with "thought-provoking" and "intuitive" questions, such as, "how does that make you feel?" and, "why do you think that is?" These questions would drive me insane because, in my mind, my therapist was supposed to cure me. She was supposed to be the one to answer and analyze any questions and obscurities, but instead, she tried to get me to do the work. So after a few months of seeing her, I told her I was better and I stopped showing up.

Big mistake, but only a small regret. Because before I knew it, it was only a few months later when I was lying on the bathroom floor covered in blood.