I'm not entirely sure of where I should start, or even if this post belongs here, but I'm not sure where the hell else it would belong.
I'm seventeen, eighteen by this November.
I've been through a rough childhood. I don't want to specify what went down, but I have diagnosed OCD, PTSD, depression, and a currently noted but not yet properly diagnosed empathy issue which came about around the same time as the PTSD.
I will say that part of the rough childhood involved my being groped non-consensually multiple times and forced into kissing + threatened with rape by a boy my age who had forced me into dating him. Other stuff was going on at the time as well, but again, I'm not a big fan of specifics. I will say my parents went through an extremely rough divorce at the time, right after we moved away from my childhood home to a place i never really liked, and this resulted in pretty consistent unintentional abandonment and a huge disconnect between myself and my parents as I began to crumble. That was not their faults. It was just how things went, and we all came out of it hurt.
I was supposed to graduate this year. I say supposed to because I obviously have not; since 6th grade, where my parents really started fighting, I've had horrible depression, and school was an impossibility. I'd go, but I was never really there, not mentally. I was constantly getting yelled at and told I was lazy or not trying hard enough by teachers, and as a kid who had gotten straight A's all my life before the depression, I had no idea how to handle this. I kept trying to tell people it wasn't me, it was something in my head and I was terrified, and that I didn't feel safe anywhere and couldn't do my work because it made me feel unintelligent, unsafe and angry and a whole smoothie of emotions I still can't place. Nobody believed me. Nothing ever got better. Since then I've been the lazy kid with no motivation, the kid who used to make my parents proud.
Now I listen to them praise my friends as I do makeup homework just to graduate. My teachers all speak about me fondly because I've always been good with socialising; I'm socially confident, at least, and always love to talk to teachers and adults. But when it comes to grades or anything with actual meaning, it's always, "You're a smart kid, and that's why I'm so disappointed in you." I get high scores on tests because I truly do love to learn (though nobody believes me), and on every English exam I've scored extremely high; writing and drawing are two things I adore, with a slight emphasis on the former, and I put my heart into learning anything to do with either. But my being good at the test-taking has only convinced everyone that my lack of ability to turn homework in truly is simply a product of laziness. I wonder whether they're correct or not. Maybe they are. I don't blame any of them; I barely tell them about what I'm going through until I burst, and all they must think is that I'm making excuse after excuse. I lie all the time to make people hate me less, especially about whether I've done homework, or done this or that, because I don't want to let them down, so I'm sure everyone assumes I'm lying about the depression, too, to get out of doing things.
I disappoint everyone. My parents constantly bring it up, even if they don't say it outright all the time. My teachers did. Everyone I thought loved or cared about me always ends up telling me the same thing: I'm a disappointment to them, and it's because I'm lazy and ungrateful. Sometimes I believe them and start to forget how difficult it is for me to do anything these days.
I haven't gotten my driver license yet. Most of my other friends haven't, either, but I completed my required thirty hours of study since I was being ungrateful for expecting rides places. I got the certificate I was supposed to take in to the DMV, and then I hid it, and now I can't find it. I suppose I hid it awfully well. I was so stressed about the idea of taking the test because I knew I'd fail and let everyone down like I always manage to do, and then my parents would talk about how my best friend is so much smarter and better than me and can actually do things successfully, and then I'd get scolded for being lazy and not studying hard enough, probably justifiably.
All of my friends are going off to college. Either their parents paid or they got amazing grades. I wish I could be happy for them, but instead I feel a burning anger, an agony that is eating me from within. They talk about how anxious they are to move away in a week, to go off to beautiful mountainous universities and learn everything they could possibly dream of, and I can't help but want to scream in their faces about my anxieties, about the anxieties that will grow in the soon to be empty spaces my friends once populated. I want to rake my nails down my face as I tell them how jealous I am that the worries in their minds are ones of how their amazing new lives will be, while I remain here alone, dissolving into nothingness.
I don't say anything to them. I don't want them to know how much it hurts me. That would just be an extra burden on them. When I give them my goodbyes they smile and say we'll meet again soon. When they give me theirs I can't help but feel the crushing finality of it all. They're moving forward, and I'm unable to follow. Sometimes, when I'm not having night terrors, I dream about meeting them and their parents again, but in these dreams they all hate me, and I'm a pathetic bug to them. Sometimes I feel that way in real life. I always suspect my friends are lying to me about everything, and that, in the end, I am a only a burden to them. They must despise me for how useless and selfish I am.
I haven't been suicidal, or at least I do not think I have been. I'm not sure, at this point. I love my writing even though it's stilted, I love my art regardless of its quality, and I love so many of the people in my life, even though I doubt they love me back, and I know they lie to me to keep me from getting hurt by the truth. I don't want to kill myself. I want to continue my writing, and my art, and everything I love doing. I don't want all of that to be lost to the vast nothingness of death. The thought terrifies me. Death itself is a horror to me. There are so many things I love and do not want to leave, not yet, not any time soon. The thought of not being able to chase my dreams and pursue my writing and art further hurts me.
Which is why I'm terrified. Recently, in these last two months, suicidal thoughts have crept back into my mind from wherever they were sleeping after my first bout of true depression when I was young. I've found myself slipping into violent thinking, full of anger and fear, and suicide has been a common thought I wonder over every few hours. It hasn't formed into a want yet; if anything, it's quite the opposite. I'm terrified that I will kill myself. That I'll snap, and take my self-harming too far. I have read so many stories of people just like me, who feel desperately out of control, but who think they will never kill themselves, only to one day lose their grip on reality, lose their strength, and take their own lives just like that. I dread that idea. I hate knowing that even though right now I don't think I will kill myself within the next few days, the more I question it the less sure I feel of that. Do I know for sure I won't kill myself? No, I do not. If anything, I have no trust for myself. I have fallen into manic states of depression, and who is to say I won't do so in the next week and make a sudden decision? It's not beyond me; I've done it before, when I was twelve just after school, only to be stopped by my sobbing mother pounding and begging on the other side of the bathroom door - though I doubt she had assumed I was aiming to bleed myself out that day. I cannot confidently promise myself I won't take my life. Sometimes the thought even sounds good. Other times I'm so incredibly apathetic to everything, so incredibly dead mentally, that I could not care less. These times terrify me.
Lately I've noticed that I will be sitting in a car, or crossing a road, and my brain, seemingly without my own willing, begins to beg a god I do not believe in to send a car crashing into me. I stare out at train tracks and imagine how easy it would be to end myself in the blink of an eye. I contemplate what it might feel like to overdose on every prescription medicine I own. And I am terrified. I know these thoughts aren't normal. They aren't the usual thoughts which are common in OCD cases. They're my brain beginning to try and ease itself into these ideas. I don't want it to, but I am not sure I have control over this.
I don't want to kill myself. So much of me wants to live. I have goals, I have dreams, and it hurts me to imagine leaving behind no legacy, nothing at all. It hurts to imagine never telling the stories I want to tell, never growing up and experiencing all there is to experience. This fear I have makes me want to believe there is no chance of me offing myself. And yet I know something is very, very wrong this time. I hate so much of my life with a passion that I have not had in a long while. My panic attacks are worse now, and my habit of cutting as self-punishment for being emotional has returned. My depression, this time, seems utterly unbeatable, doomed to worsen and worsen until I break. And even though I try desperately to swear to myself I won't go through with anything stupid, because I truly do not want to, I can't swear on it. I feel everything getting worse and worse, and I no longer trust my own brain at all. I feel like it is out to kill me! I'm terrified that, at some point soon, I will snap and kill myself without bothering to think anything through. I hide my knife collection away from myself now because I'm terrified that I might get too angry, too focused on punishing myself for existing, and I might go ahead and try to stab myself to death.
I don't know what to do. I've been reading so many accounts here, and so many of you are so concrete in either your willingness to live or your want to die. I almost envy it, and I feel awful to say that. I think that I want to live, but I don't trust myself enough to know I won't suddenly change my mind, and I've been living these past few weeks in fear like I have never felt before. I want to tell myself that fearing is good, that it means I won't do anything, but I know that isn't true. So many people fear they might snap before they do. I don't want it to be me. God I don't want it to be me.
Please help me. I'm not sure how. I just need to hear someone say something that lets me know I won't do something stupid. I need someone to tell me I'm not alone and that death isn't my only option. I'm so worried that no matter what I do, suicide will catch up to me and I'll go through with it. Please, fuck, someone tell me it doesn't have to be the way I fear it is. I'm so alone and terrified and cannot even trust myself anymore, can't even believe myself when I say I want to live without fearing I may be lying. The more I sit alone with these thoughts, the more inevitable suicide seems no matter how much I do not want it.
If anyone can give me a sign, anything at all, that I don't have to kill myself in the end, I need it so desperately right now. I've never been so afraid in my life. I don't (think I) want to die.
Submitted August 14, 2019 at 07:52PM by justalonelywanderer https://ift.tt/33B6T0Q
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