![]() I am telling you to stay here because right now, you are walking through a valley. Sometimes the only way to see stars is to have darkness. If you ever need to be reminded of this, look outside during the darkest night. Have faith that in the darkest times, there will be light again. But even there, there are months where the sun doesn’t set. Some days it might seem like you’re living at the South Pole, where the sun doesn’t rise for months at a time. Some days, it’ll feel like your chest is collapsing because the weight of the world is too much to bear. Some days it’ll feel like you’re floating on air, like you’re weightless, you can do anything. I’m telling you depression will come in cycles - high tides and low tides. If love were enough, the world would be different. I’m also not going to tell you to stay here because there are people who love you. I’m not going to say that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, because to do so would be to deny the truth that sometimes this pain doesn’t go away. It’s the only way you’re going to get through this. I have faith that the ground will stay firm beneath my feet, holding me up when I am too weak to stand.īelieve in something. Sometimes the only thing I can believe in is gravity. And you need to have faith in something - I don’t know if it’s God, or if you wonder if God’s abandoned you. I tell you this not to scare you, but to remind you that you are a survivor. I am going to tell you that the journey ahead of you is going to be long and hard. I don’t know where you are in your healing journey, or even if you have begun healing yet. I’ve survived x, y and z, and today I did a, b, and c. I look to the past because it helps me gauge how far I’ve come. I know what’s happened in my life, but I don’t know what’s going to. I live in terms of anniversaries because they’re set in stone. The future terrifies me simply because it’s unknown. I focus on how long it’s been since the events in my past, because that way I don’t have to focus on the future. Time goes on, but I still live my life in terms of anniversaries. Here’s the thing I’ve learned: time goes on. In fact, for every answer I don’t have, I have a million more questions. Maybe you’re wondering what you did to deserve all this pain. Sometimes I wonder why I survived when so many others do not. I’m still wrestling with tough feelings and intrusive thoughts that won’t go away. I’m still trying to pick up the pieces of my life. I understand because I, too, attempted suicide. I understand what it’s like to feel as though giving up is your only option. I understand what it’s like to be on the front lines of this very real battle. I’m writing this letter, I’m telling you all of this because I understand. Let the emotions roll over you like waves take them as they come, one at a time. To take the focus away from you is to invalidate the pain you are feeling. They, too, may be grieving and hurting, but this is not about them. Don’t let anybody take the pain you might be feeling away from you and assign it to themselves. #MY FRIEND COMMITTED SUICIDE SERIES#I don’t know if it was a genetic predisposition, a single event or a series of events culminating in this one cataclysmic moment in your life. I don’t know what led you to attempt suicide. Some days you might be feeling everything at once, and somedays you might be feeling nothing at all - you might not know which one is worse neither do I. Every emotion you have and don’t have is valid. You may be feeling a lot of feelings right along with these words: anger, sadness, shame and maybe even some guilt.Įverything you are feeling right now is valid. Don’t turn these words into an “I love you, but…” Your friends and family are probably telling you they love you. Right now, you’re probably hearing a lot of words from family and friends, some you may even be saying to yourself. If you do this enough times, the words become useless - displacing and relocating until the original meaning is lost. You take them out of a context they were meant for and place them in another, and they make no sense or they change the meaning of the new context. But that’s the thing about words: context is everything. To be honest, I’ve thought about what I was going to say in this letter for a while now, and I’m still not quite sure I have the right words. ![]()
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