Given Hope

past

After my parents divorced I couldn't find anything to make me happy. I would talk on the phone with my dad while he was in California and we would both cry. My mom was struggling with paying all the bills on her own, and at school I stopped being a good student.

I had friends who had known what happened. My dad used to hit my mom. But my friends only said that they understood how I felt, but they didn't really. They heard the words coming out of my mouth but they didn't feel the sadness pouring out of my heart. I had trouble fitting in at school. Everybody could afford better clothes than me. They all wore the clothes that were in style and had the latest smart phones.

I was always the weird girl, who was too outgoing, tried too hard. People would call me annoying, nobody would pick me to be on their team during PE, and nobody wanted to be in my group for language arts projects. At home my mom was too stressed to show me support for the good things I was doing, and she yelled at me for the bad. My depression got worse as the years accumulated and I ended up looking to self harm as a way to express what I felt inside.

It was small at first, full of meaning but small little incisions in my arm. But it eventually grew into a bad habit, addictive like a drug. I would take blades out of sharpeners and steal my moms razors to break them and get the blades out. It got extremely out of hand within a matter of months, and by the time I was a freshman in high school I seemed to depend on it. I always had a blade in my backpack. And would do it for no reason. But for all the reasons, all at the same time.

I did have friends who knew what I did. But like before with my words, they didn't understand. They would tell me to stop and that they cared. But you don't just stop snorting cocaine. You don't just stop smoking cigarettes. That's the thing they couldn't wrap their heads around. They hadn't done anything like this before.

I was skipping my classes everyday, and would smoke weed in the allies near my school. Sometimes with my closer friends and other times with somebody I had just ran into in the halls. It was a chain reaction of events that had lead up to me eventually needing to go to therapy. My therapist and I would argue for the hour that we had together for weeks. Until finally, he broke me down and I spilled out everything.

He decided I needed to be on medication.

"It's what's best for you at the moment"

At first, the medication would make me shake. I would wake up at night, sweating. My friends would tell me to relax at school but they didn't realize that I was being drugged by the pills and by my own mind. I would twitch in class and generally felt exhausted. My starting dose was 5 pills a day. 2 for my anxiety, and the other 3 for my depression.

Obviously at this point it hadn't worked. I was beginning to cut on my thighs so my therapist couldn't see and one night the bleeding wouldn't stop, I had cut a little too deep on my upper thigh and I got into my bath tub and laid there for the 3 hours it took for the wound to finally clot.

My doctor upped my dose to 5 for depression and 2 for anxiety. Nothing was working. I felt lost in the dark pit of life. Trying to find somebody to catch me as I was endlessly falling. Screaming into the bottomless pit and nobody seemed to hear or even care.

February 4th of that year I had randomly decided I didn't want to do it anymore. I had my best friend, and I had my mom, my brothers, my boyfriend. I had everybody. But nobody saw what was really happening. It was a extremely big decision done in an extremely short amount of time.

I told my small group of friends (the kids I sat next to in class to not be alone, not really friends, they didn't care) at school that I was going to go to the bathroom. And I was planning on doing so, but something made me walk into a usually empty hall where I knew nobody would walk into or walk by and I sat down against the wall. I remember the wall feeling cold against my back but I didn't seem fazed since everything else in my life was cold either way.

I reached into my back pack and got my medication, I had it so I could take it during lunch. But instead of just grabbing one, I poured the whole container into my hand and stared at them for a bit. I thought about anybody I wanted to text or call quickly. But my mind was empty. There was nothing left I cared about enough. I choked down the pills, without anything to drink. I remember regretting not having a water bottle with me. What a stupid thought.

One of the girls I used to talk to at the time walked by as I was about to drink more pills from my other container. She stopped and asked me what I was doing. To this day, I thank her for saving my life.

My principal came down to get me and put me in the office. I had lost consciousness and had gone to sleep. My mom had come to pick me up and 6 hours later took me to the hospital as I awoke. I lied and said it was an accidental overdose and they let me go. I slept for a really long time after that. The powerful drugs still taking a toll on my body as I vomited for 3 days and when I went back to school everybody pretended they didn't know what happened. Even though I was taken out in a wheel chair.

2 years later I'm happy. I'm a good student, I'm no longer on medication. I'm happier than I ever thought I would be.

This is to Ruth. Who I know will never read this. But thank you.