Why do I want to die?
At first, I began answering the question with bad memories and haunting thoughts:
- Because when I close my eyes I still felt the hands of a child molester crawling over my skin.
- Because the only thing I learned in elementary school was that a heart could be broken and no one would notice or pay attention
- Because, to me, the word ‘home’ meant angry voices, slamming doors
- Because home was a reminder that I watched my daddy die
- Because my entire life, feeling safe meant being alone
- Because I’m bulimic
- Because I’m an addict
- Because of all the nights I lay broken, sobbing on the floor, begging for my mind to stop thinking and my heart to stop aching
- Because I’m a murderer
- Because dragging a blade across my skin and watching it bleed means that it doesn’t only hurt on the inside
- Because I believed in dreams that didn’t believe in me
- Because it takes a handful of pills to sleep through the night and another handful to face the day
- Because I have more doctors than I have friends
- Because I am done trying to cope with the hurt, and make sense of the senseless
- Because I have screwed up relationships
- Because I can’t watch my son suffer
- Because I am a liar
- Because everything, absolutely everything, hurts .
- Because PTSD keeps me from being able to work and support my family
- Because I constantly fail
- Because my body is failing me; medically speaking
When I look deeper, all of this is an outline of all the things that I wished had never happened to me- the events that were beyond my control, the events that I lacked the capacity to control, and even the events where having control is what made them so painful. It’s a wish list of things I want to change. And from a broader scope, it is a list of things I feel I am incapable of changing.
But the truth is, these things have all changed. In fact, my entire life has always been one changing event after another. The one thing that has not changed was me, stuck firm at the bottom of emotion, pain, despair, and hopelessness. All the while life moved on, transforming from one scene to another leaving me with a broken heart and a broken mind. And because I had never allowed myself to change with it, I am not only left living in the past, the past is left living in me.
I want to end my life because I had spent the greater part of my childhood as a victim of abuse.
But, I’m not being held down by those hands anymore.
I want to end my life because elementary school was more about survival than it was about learning.
But I’m older now.
I want to end my life because I grew up in a house filled with mood swings and violent outbursts.
But I’m not that little girl hiding under the covers anymore.
I want to end my life because my brain haunts me, fear controls me, and my illness overtakes me.
In the end I realize that it isn’t my life that needs to change; it is me that needs to change. And if that is my answer, if that is the truth behind why I attempted suicide and why I still want to die, then it isn’t my past that is haunting me, it is how I see my past that haunts me. It is how I allow my past to affect me in the present.
This is what I need to work on. If I want my future to be different then I need to be different. I spend so much time trying to help other people understand me that I never take the time to understand myself. When doctors, family, and friends ask me questions, especially why I am suicidal, I unconsciously look for the answers that would justify why I feel this way. It is as if I am trying to convince them that if they had experienced the same things, or if they felt the same way I do, then they would be suicidal too.
I go back and read all of this and think that this is all pathetic. “Suck it up”, I say to myself. People have it so much worse. You are a crybaby. You just want attention.
Then I realize, what I’ve written here doesn’t even begin to explain the bipolar, anxiety, eating disorder, PTSD, the pain. It doesn’t explain the constant inner turmoil and fear that plagues me and buries me in my covers of darkness, hiding from the world. It doesn’t even scratch the surface of how I feel- because putting that into words is impossible.
And that is why suicide feels like the only answer.
~Lindsay