Today, I wrote my suicide letter
This morning was one of those nights when I couldn’t sleep. For the 14th day in a row, sleep eluded me as I tossed and turned in bed. And cried. I’ve been crying a lot of late. That’s what all the books I’ve read calls grieving. It’s this heaviness lodged deep inside your chest that makes it difficult to breathe. Makes it difficult to imagine what life was before everything started to hurt. Before life showed you how ugly it could get.
So I wrote my suicide letter and embellished it with all the things I can’t say now that I’m alive. Things that make me sound almost selfish. Almost possessed. Almost.
I hate the almost word.
But yeah, I wrote about how I mourn the life I would never get to live. The childhood I never experienced and the teenagehood that will never be. How I miss all the people that made me laugh until my belly hurt. My dead friends, my parents. My life before mental illnesses and breakdowns and psychiatric medications.
Someone told me yesterday to write it all down. To use my rage as an expression. So I did. I wrote about how much I hated my life and how people never knew the right thing to say when you tell them you’re depressed and suicidal. They ask you to let go of the past like you didn’t think of that before. They ask you to go out more and have more friends and practice self-compassion and self-care and all the right stuff.
Do they not understand how difficult it is to get out of bed every morning? How you have to look away from every sharp object in your house everyday even though they call your veins to kiss them? How going on is more harder than dying? How you never know if you’re going to be okay and how you’re sick and tired of not being able to function without your meds? Don’t they know? Don’t they care?
They tell you to try God. To try prayers. To take natural herbs and connect with the universe and align your chakra and whatnot. Isn’t it common knowledge that you can force a horse to the river but you can’t force it to drink water? How then can a person keep fighting when the fight has gone out of them? When, although there’s a lot to look forward to, nothing seems worth it? How do they keep going? What do they do?
Today, I wrote my suicide letter. I don’t know when I’ll get to use it—I hope I never get to use it—but I know that whoever reads it will never understand what it felt like to be me. What if felt like to be robbed of everything familiar. Everything you hold dear. What if felt, and still feels like, to try and try to live and each day it gets tougher. But I hope they know that I tried. I hope they know that I fought for as long as possible.
And I hope they know, that as Phil Kaye said, “If you wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up, one day you’ll forget why.”
