THE MEMORY OF YOU...US...MY 8TH GRADE YEAR

Loss Without Limits

       “That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.” I do not know who first said this quote, but they were right. Pain demands to be felt. I will never again look at Valentine's Day the same. You think you know everything there is to know about pain until you experience true loss. My name is Zoie, I am a fourteen-year-old girl,  and this is the story of how I lost my friend to suicide.

      Experiencing a loss to suicide is not something you expect or hope to experience. I know I never thought I would ever lose someone to suicide. Until it actually happened. My close friend of 3 years, committed suicide. He was a very close friend to me. He was family to me. I never thought that I would say the words, “I didn’t get to say goodbye” But the day I lost my friend, I said those words over and over again. At the time, I would turn to my boyfriend for help and confide in him whenever I felt down. Until we broke up, and I had to turn back to friends whom I didn’t realize I had pushed away.

      Realizing that I had a lot of people who cared definitely took me a while. I thought that I was alone. I had lost my best friend and been dumped by my boyfriend, within the timeframe of one month. I had also pushed away my friends and family. I thought that I deserved all the pain I was feeling because I had messed up. I thought it was my fault. Pain demands to be felt, and it also has no limit. There is no limit to pain. To each person, pain is a completely different thing. So many people have lost someone close to them, and many have lost someone to suicide.

     At first, I kept questioning if there was anything I could have done to prevent this from happening. I would go to talk to my school counselor and tell her how I was feeling. She used an analogy to describe the grief that I was feeling. She told me to think of grief as a box with a button. The button is on the inside wall of the box.  And in this box, there is a ball. The box represents you, and the button is the trigger for the waves of grief that hit you. The ball within this box is something that triggers you to feel grief. At first, the ball will be so full of air that it constantly hits the button causing you to be hit by waves of grief on a more constant pattern. But as time goes on the ball gets smaller and smaller. So as a result, it pushes this “button” less and less. The grief we feel doesn’t just disappear after a certain amount of time. But that doesn’t mean that we can never be happy again. As time goes on, we won’t be hit by waves of grief as often and not as strongly. But that does not mean that it just disappears or that we will forget about this person and what happened. In the end, this analogy taught me that even though it hurts a lot now, it doesn’t mean that it will hurt this much forever. 

      My story is just one of thousands if not millions. Suicide is not a joke, nor is it something to be taken lightly. Things such as the “Momo Challenge” or the “Blue Whale Challenge” are prime examples of just how serious and how far so-called “jokes” can go. As reported by the many news channels, in May of 2018, it was investigated whether or not the “Momo Challenge” had anything to do with the suicide of a 12-year-old girl in Argentina. You never expect to read about a 12-year-old girl who has committed suicide. Depression and suicidal thoughts are such heartbreaking things to hear or read about and they are something you never would wish upon a person, nonetheless a child. 

     Today's society centers so much around the superficial things in life. We have been socially conditioned to think that being cruel to one another is okay, whether that be face-to-face or through a screen. Technology has made it easier to tear one another down. In our current lives we see statistics rising. We see more cases of suicidal thoughts or depression in younger children. We see schools having to send announcements to families because they lost a student. We see bullies that continue to tear others down even after someone in their community takes their own life. Instead of people doing the right thing and building each other up. 

     Once you notice signs of suicidal thoughts and depression, report it to the correct persons. Never give up on helping those who need it. If you try to solve the issue on your own, things can get extremely out of hand and if not dealt with in the correct manner by the correct persons, may end in heartbreak, pain, and loss. Just when you think you have experienced all the loss and heartbreak that you can handle, life throws more challenges at you. The one thing you should always remember is to never give up. Always remember that you matter and nobody can tell you otherwise. It’s okay to be vulnerable and allow yourself to feel, that doesn’t mean that you’re broken or weak. It just means that you’re human. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all...