156 non-regrets

last august i almost ended my life

it's this weird sort of murky blur in my memory, some things are there so sharp but some things are clouded and blown away by wind and i don't try hard to bring them back. i remember little details like what i was wearing and the way i was worried about my legs being too pale. i remember going to my school's orientation already buried in my deep dark hole; i had spent a week crying and shaking and wondering why, why anything

throughout the entire orientation i was too exhausted with depression to even feign a smile and anyway it didn't matter because i would be gone soon.

when i got home my mom knew what was happening and a few blurry hours later i was sitting in the psychiatric hospital waiting for an evaluation. her eyes were rimmed with red and i didn't care, i was too tired to care and i just kept saying that i was going to kill myself. one of the small details i'll never forget was the way i said it, completely void of tone or emotion, just fact. dry, hard, cold fact and i avoided the eyes of the strangers in the waiting room and played with the lid of a water bottle.

i lied when they asked me, was i going to follow through with it? of course not, and i turned my eyes to the window knowing that i was. they told me that "technically" they should have me admitted and i said that i needed to go home. they let me.

when we got home i stood in my room with my forehead pressed against my wall and i cried. and i was still going to kill myself.


i really don't remember that much else, other than that the feelings didn't leave me for another few weeks and i had to see a psychiatrist who told me that curing my eating disorder was as simple as going home and eating three solid meals a day. i never went back to him.

there are these things in everyone's life i call non-regrets. things that you were this close to doing but didn't, and maybe your life is a little easier because of the choice you made. maybe it helped you get into the college you've had your eye on. maybe it saved a friendship. maybe it saved your life.

this post was hard for me to remember and even harder to write, my hands are usually so steady but they're shaking. but i wanted to get this out there because i know i am not the first person and i won't be the last person to ever fall into that hole. it was the darkest place i've ever been and i don't want to go back and i don't want anybody else to go there either.

nothing anybody says can stop somebody who has absolutely made up their mind but i'm not going to leave without giving it a try



remember, the biggest thing we all have in common is that we're all going to die. time is sand slipping through all of our fingers. if that doesn't make me feel closer to the world, i don't know what does

Comments

Anonymous said…
thank you

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