Chapter 1: 11 years old.
My family was never deeply religious- we believed in God, we believed that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, we occasionally went to church. However, in the year of 2011, I found myself unknowingly drifting away from those beliefs. I cant quite remember how I stumbled upon it, but I had just gotten my first smartphone (and with it access to the internet). Now before I get into the whole gnarly story of my life, here’s a little backstory of who I was at the time.
Picture this: a slightly overweight preteen with no boobs, barely any friends, slightly overweight with the social skills of a hermit crab who mostly enjoyed playing by herself in her room. Now I have an older brother (four years older than me) who was the complete opposite of me- popular, athletic, outgoing and we never got along.
Anyways, so I’m playing in my room one day and my brother has friends over. They walk past my room and my brother starts laying on the insults- calling me an albino alien and that no one likes me- which is just so out of pocket that I am immediately offended. I don’t say anything about it to my parents since they were more focused on my brother and his blooming soccer career that I was often overlooked and left on my own.
So, the random insults continue for a few months and I know the details sound a bit vague but to be honest, I don’t really remember most of it. There are some things I do remember though- and that is that I was super into mythical creatures and I was honestly a bit into dark themes- before I knew what it was- I used to call myself a fallen angel, and I would paint pictures of people with dark wings and then one day I googled what a fallen angel is and I saw that it was angels cast out of heaven and that gave me a massive fright and I immediately stopped calling myself that and tore up the paintings and moved on with my life.
But I cant help but wonder if that influenced the awful way I felt the rest of the year and if doing that split me from God.
What I also remember is feeling so hopeless and alone that I decided that since no one wants me there- not the people at school, not the people at church, not my parents and certainly not my brother- that it would be better if I decided to remove myself from their lives permanently.
At first I thought about running away, but then quickly realised that I would have nowhere to go, no one to help me and that I would continue to be miserable. I remember watching this show on tv about teenagers who would choke themselves to get a rush of endorphins and they would feel better after doing it but if you do it for long enough then you would eventually die since you are technically hanging yourself.
So that was when I wrote my first suicide note- basically detailing everything that was going on and blaming my brother for it and telling my parents that now they would only have to live with the child that they actually want.
And I remember the day that I planned on killing myself so clearly- it was after school, my parents were still at work and my brother was at soccer practice and I took a piece of a washing line that was leftover and decided to hang myself from the door frame of my room- there was no door and only the frame-sort of looked something like this:
But because I was overweight, the door frame wasn’t strong enough to support my weight and I didn’t want to be alive to explain why the door frame is broken and deal with my parents’ anger. I then decided to go to the backyard since the washing line frame is metal and should have been strong enough to hold my weight but then I thought that the neighbours are super nosy and often peek over the wall and I definitely didn’t want to deal with the embarrassment of being saved by my neighbour and have the whole neighbourhood know that I tried to kill myself.
From a Christian standpoint- I didn’t know killing myself was a sin at that time because it was never something that was openly talked about at home or at church, and at the time, I didn’t go through with it because I was more embarrassed by the thought of dealing with the consequences of it being unsuccessful. But now that I’m older, and I have a better relationship with God, I like to think that those feelings of embarrassment and not being able to get a suitable place from which to hang myself was Him and the Holy Spirit intervening to save my life- and for that I praise God.
Chapter 2: 14-16 years old
Alright, so it’s Christmas 2013, I lived until the end of 7th grade and things are not going well at home. My parents are fighting all the time, my mother is constantly working late to provide us with more money, my brother is always at soccer practice and my dad is cheating on my mom.
Skip to the end of 8th grade and my parents are officially divorced and things are rough. My mom keeps trying to save her marriage and maintain the family unit meaning that my dad keeps coming back for two weeks at a time and I was getting very confused and frustrated because every time he comes back, he apologizes and says he’s going to change and be present and then he fucks off again to be with his girlfriend her daughters.
So the last time he came back, he was only there for three days. For the first two days, I ignore him-think wall of silence, no direct eye contact and if I do need to speak to him, I’m being a real bitch about it because my feelings are hurt. On the third evening, my dad picks me up from my friend’s house and I finally decide to forgive him and I tell him that I forgive him and that I am willing to try to accept him back in my life- HE LEAVES THE NEXT DAY NEVER TO BE SEEN OR HEARD FROM AGAIN.
Well not completely unseen or unheard from- I saw him two times again in that same year and both times I went home crying because I was so hungry.
Anyways, so I’m 14 years old, dealing with the loss of my dad, my brother going through his own shit meaning that we aren’t really speaking- just kind of existing past each other and my mom is crying or angry all the time. So basically, life sucks ass. Now at least at this time I had a large mixture of friends that I could speak to about what was going on- the only thing is that I never spoke to anyone about what was going on at home. I would always just put on a happy smile and joke and laugh with everyone so that no one would know how much I was actually hurting inside… although no one had a problem telling me what was wrong in their lives.
Now I was in ninth grade at the time and that was the height of my sexual awakening. I became obsessed with my friend’s older brother’s friend- her name was Dylan and she was a year older than us. She was the most beautiful person I ever saw but she was dating some guy at the time and obviously, this was the first time I started having feelings for a girl and it was pretty scary. I kept telling myself that it was just a girl crush, those were popular at the time and that it didn’t mean I had romantic feelings for her- because that was a sin. Anyways, she eventually breaks up with the guy and the two of us start talking and eventually start dating but no one could find out because I wasn’t out to my mother or family and I know that they wouldn’t approve of me dating a female.
Anyways, it turns out that Dylan had a bunch of mental health issues that made her suicidal and I would occasionally have to convince her not to kill herself even though I was fighting the same urge as well. Oh yeah, I didn’t mention? A couple of my friends, including my now girlfriend used to cut to lessen the pain of existence and I started doing it too. I remember feeling so overwhelmed and anxious one morning and cutting my arm up so much that it started bleeding through my school shirt during the course of the day.
When my girlfriend found out I was cutting she broke up with me because it was triggering for her and she felt that she was a bad influence on me so yeah that sucked, but then I started dating her friend again. I should probably mention that before dating her, I was dating her guy friend who was best friends with her ex-boyfriend. Anyways some things happened and then like a month later me and the guy broke up and then me and Dylan started dating again- I was real messy shame.
So summer rolls up and I’m stuck at home because I cant visit her that much or else my mom would get suspicious but then right before school starts for the next year (I am in tenth grade at this point), I break up with Dylan because my mom was actually getting suspicious and she says she understands but we keep talking as if we didn’t break up and then a couple of months later, she completely ghosts me and then disappears from school. At this time I spiral into a super panic because she told me that if she ever stops coming to school that she’s probably dead. So I’m grieving cause I thought she was dead and I cant tell anyone because then they would know that I was bisexual and I couldn’t have that and then it turns out she was just away at a mental institution but wanted nothing to do with me when she came back and basically told me to fuck off. So yeah, I was dealing with a lot of heartbreak, a lot of loss, a lot of anxiety about school and I’m constantly waking up in the middle of the night after struggling for hours to fall asleep and I’m dealling with stomach ulcers due to stress and shit.
So we go to the doctor and she prescribes sleeping pills and because I am going through so much pain and there’s no support from my friends or people at home so I wrote another suicide note and planned to drink a shit ton of sleeping pills and kill myself….although, once again, something inside of me just wouldn’t let me go through with it and I realized, I didn’t actually want to die, I just wanted my situation to change, I just wanted to stop feeling pain and stop feeling so alone.
After that, I kind of just tried to stop feeling all together but some days I would just break. One day in particular I came home feeling overwhelmed and just cried and cried for hours and wanted to cut but then I just started praying while crying and threw the blade down onto the ground.
And I would love to say that was the last time I cut but sometimes when I am super stressed out- like while I was still studying in university- I couldn’t take time to relax and I was feeling so overwhelmed and stressed that I cut during an online meeting. I tried reaching out to campus mental health services and after like three sessions, my therapist ghosted me… to be fair, she didn’t remember that we already had a session together when I showed up for my second online session.
But yeah, I’m married now and I remember praying to God one night that I find a good man and then I met my now husband the next day. Anyways, the point of me sharing this horrible part of my life is because I recently realized that God had a plan for my life and it wasn’t up to me to decide when that life would end that He was always with me, even through my darkest days and kept me alive even when I wanted to die.