To The Younger Who Sometimes Considered Suicide

When you were just three years old, your mother decided she no longer wanted to be a parent anymore. She wrapped you up in ill-fitting clothes and dropped you off on the steps of her brother. For three to four years, you believed you had a family. That was until you stepped off the yellow school bus on your eighth birthday and met with red, white, and blue lights of a cop car. They removed you from the only family home you could remember under false pretenses. They told you that you were going on a field trip for the weekend. It was not until you arrived at your first foster home a couple of weeks later that you learned just how not right things were. They tell you that the one person you trusted not to leave or hurt you was a monster just like the rest of them. You don’t want to believe them, but you still have nightmares about all the unspeakable acts that happened behind closed doors and the events that occurred out in the open.

On Halloween, your foster mother decided to treat her son to Chuckie Cheese and forced you to stay with a babysitter. She forced you to share the bags of candy you got from the babysitter with that same son. You shouldn’t have been surprised. It wasn’t the first time she treated you as if you didn’t matter or that you didn’t deserve to be there. She kept you locked up in a back bedroom with your siblings and only let you out for school, church, or on a rare occasion, your caseworker was coming to visit. You were naïve to believe that things would change for the better when they moved you to your next foster home.

Your foster mother was a little better but very controlling. She would force you to stay in the bathtub for extensive amounts of time because she didn’t believe you were clean enough, or have you stand in front of the refrigerator with your arms pointing straight out for twenty minutes. When you moved to put your arms down because it began to burn, she would roughly grab them and force them back up. She would beat you or what she liked to call discipline you and your siblings, but you knew the abuse was a little more than just a whooping. So, when she tried to hit your siblings the same way she hit you, you jumped in. You took the beatings for them. You were the youngest trying to protect everyone, but it seemed as if no one wanted to protect you. She sent you to live somewhere else, separated from your siblings. They classified you as a “troublemaker,” disrupting the peace in the house. People told you to stop complaining about being separated since you only moved next door, and you still got to see them every day at school. They didn’t care that you felt scared and lonely. Finally, in 2003 you found your forever home.

For the first time, you had both a mother and a father. They doted on you. They praised all your accomplishments and helped you pick yourself up during your failures. You didn’t feel abused or neglected when they punished you for all the referrals and suspensions you managed to rack up. They didn’t make you feel dumb or get angry with you when you just couldn’t crack geometry and managed to get straight f’s in that course. Instead, your mom would stay up all night, helping you with geometry and trig. Your dad would bring you food on the days you had to stay after school for choir, tutoring, and cheer. You were so happy and so content. You didn’t realize that everything could be snatched away in what you thought was a blink of an eye, but really, you refused to see all the warning signs.

Your mother’s demons had finally caught up to her. She found herself trapped in the bottom of a bottle. You were too weak to pull it from her grasp. Those nights she used to stay up helping you with homework turned into nights where she yelled and threw things. It turned into you hiding on the front porch in the pouring rain. You didn’t know how to handle it. There was no one at school you could talk to or confide in. You were the one poor lone black child, surrounded by a bunch of wealthy white students who have been together since preschool. How could you tell them that you were hurting and that you were frightened? You couldn’t, so you held it in. You didn’t want them to think any less of the classmate they never invited to anything anyway. The only timed they even showed a little ounce of understanding or empathy was when your mother died your senior year of high school, but that didn’t matter because, at that point, you were already too far gone. You no longer wanted anything to do with the majority of them and the couple of people you had in your corner, you pushed them away. All because you held on too tightly to something/someone that wasn’t yours, trying to stay grounded. When you lost both him and her you crumbled.

The thoughts in your head became so loud, and you couldn’t run away from them. They taunted you every chance they had. You’ll never mean as much to anyone as they do to you. You are only meant to be used and then discarded. Even God doesn’t believe you deserve parents. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have given you one that abandoned you and another who preferred death. He wouldn’t have given you a father who told you straight to your face he never wanted you and that your mother forced him.

Other moments your mind was just blank like someone flipped off a switch. You felt nothing and couldn’t see anything either. Your eyes stared unblinking at the ceiling, and your body laid spread eagle on the bed. You physically couldn’t hear anything. You were isolated. And you could only figure out one way to make it all end, death. Maybe then you would have mattered to somebody now that you weren’t taking up space.

You imagined what would happen if you tied weights to your feet and jumped off a pier into the ocean, or if you took the sharp knife you snuck into the bathroom with you and just slid it across the blue vein so prominent in the wrist you tattooed over. You imagined ingesting a volatile mix of the Tylenol, Excedrin, Nyquil, and any other prescriptions your father kept stocked in his bathroom. The only thing that stopped you from acting on these were your little siblings still fighting to make it to adulthood. They had already lost so much. What energy you had you redirected into raising them. You made dinner and helped with homework. You communicated with teachers and did school visits. You were the shoulder they cried on and the ear they vented to. Over time as more and more problems piled on, your siblings became not enough to silence the voices.

Your father became sick, diagnosed with a brain tumor. Without anyone asking, you gave up everything. You might as well have dropped out of college. It took you a year to finish one creative writing class. You gave up your first real well-paying job before it could even start. And then, when you realized that there was no food in the pantries and no money to get them restocked any time soon, you took it upon yourself to get a third shift job at the Speedway gas station ten minutes up the road. While there, they forced you to work the night shift alone and often accosted by older gentlemen who never quite understood no means no. But you did not resign from your post. You could not quit because the house needed food more than you needed to feel safe, and your younger brother needed you more than you needed to feel peace of mind. You couldn’t help but feel taken for granted. You listened on as the father you’ve been taking care of for months made you and your siblings out to be the bad guys when he landed in the hospital from a brain bleed. You heard him tell his family that you were all useless and that none of you helped out around the house or with cooking. That same feeling of taking up too much space and worthlessness you had before started to overpower you.

You went literal months without showering or washing your hair. You brushed your teeth once in a blue moon. And food, food became the most unappealing thing. Your siblings would praise you about how much weight you were losing and that your technique of counting calories was working wonders. They failed to see that you weren’t eating at all, hoping you would waste away to nothing. You tried to talk to them about how your depression and anxiety were at an all-time high, how you felt like you couldn’t breathe both physically and mentally. They told you it was a figment of your imagination and that black people do not take medicine for their problems. To save yourself from destruction, you decided the best option was to quit your job and move out. That was the best choice you have made up to this day.

When you first moved out, you were broken and insecure. You found your worth in feeling needed by everyone and needing men to appreciate your beauty/ body. Over that year of being on your own, you managed to flourish. Your confidence grew by leaps and bounds. You wore whatever you wanted and started to speak your mind anymore. You proved to yourself that you deserved to be admitted to the top school for social work even if you decide to unenroll and move back home. When people told you, you were making a huge mistake, you were able to laugh it off. You finally learned to listen to your heart about what you wanted and how to get there. You wrote and published a book, created a website and YouTube channel. You are building an empire for yourself and future kids. Most important, you finally learned to validate your feelings. You are not less than because you don’t have a mother or didn’t have as much money as the people you went to high school with. You are not worthless just because your father told you he never wanted you, and men couldn’t see past your “voluptuous body.” It’s okay that you have depression and anxiety. That doesn’t make you less black or weak. And if in the future another doctor determines the best way to help you is medication, that’s okay too. You deserve to be able to heal and have a great quality of life. You deserve to take up space. You belong here.