05/06/2015

Sitting on the bed. Legs crossed. Trance-like state. Staring at the wallet. Spreading them out. Organizing them. Staring at them. Staring at them. Staring at them. Ears ringing. Moving without knowing it. Hands shaking. Picking one up. Staring. Can’t look. Closing my eyes. Taking it. Sipping water. Swallowing. Opening my eyes. Repeat. One by one. Can’t think about it. Keep going. One by one. Keep going. None left. None left. Finishing final notes. Sending her my goodbye. Finally telling her I love her. Already hazy. Nothing is real. My eyes close. Nothing is real. I’m sorry. Goodbye

No one thought I’d survive it. I did. A crazy amount of opiates mixed with barbiturates; I planned and planned. Waking up in a daze, unable to talk, unable to walk, everything shaking. Blood pressure too low to take a sample, drifting in and out of consciousness. On breathing machines, ready to be intubated at any minute, mother and father watching their child die; I remember none of it.

What I do remember, I wish I could forget. The years and years and years of overwhelming anxiety. The isolation, the apathy, the learned numbness. Experimenting with restricting and purging, self harm. Avoiding schoolwork for years, starting to fail all my classes after being told I was ‘way too advanced to ever get a B’. Staring at my homework, staring at my homework, staring at my homework, going numb and wanting to scream because I couldn’t do it. Maybe I knew the material, maybe I didn’t, I couldn’t do it and I didn’t know why, my parents didn’t know why, no one knew why, why, why all of this was happening to me.

Deciding that year was the last, planning for months. The rush I got from buying the pills. The only good type of anxiety I’d ever felt.

I cracked. Pictured my parents finding my cold body in the bed, mother crying and yelling, father throwing himself on top of me, trying to turn back time; I was okay with it. I pictured her seeing my final words, reading my note, whispering ‘I love you too’ to an audience who couldn’t hear it; I was okay with it. I cracked and everything that mattered in my life, all the reasons I was keeping myself alive for so long, were meaningless. Nothing was real. I was a teenage nihilist, deciding the meaning of life in my free time instead of going out with the friends I didn’t have. I decided there was none.

I don’t see a point in living. Life is meaningless, everything is made up, and people are just self-righteous, floating molecules that think the universe is able to acknowledge their existence. Life is meaningless. But, do I need meaning to do something? Do I disappear if I recognize the futility of life? No. Everything is trivial, pointless, needless, life is meaningless and I want to succeed.

My brother breaking down in front of my mom, our mom, his mom, crying about all the things he never said. The four and six year olds, the three year old twins across the street wondering what happened to their babysitter. Friends that were no longer friends thinking about how far things drifted and what went wrong. No longer okay with it. The depression, the anxiety, the OCD, the unstable mood, the self-hate; they all still exist. I won’t pretend they don’t exist for the sake of getting into college, won’t pretend I’m perfectly okay, won’t spew the cliche essay I think you want to hear about how I’ve had a rough life but life is a journey and I’m on a road to a better future and everything’s okay. It's not. Life sucks. Life sucks, and I want to try. Life sucks, and I want it to continue. Life sucks, and that’s okay.