I Don't Know Where This Is Going

People always say it gets better. Every time your on social media, someone is posting some inspirational quote like keep dreaming and reach for the stars or some sort of shit like that. The fact is it’s not that easy. You’ve tried and you keep failing (really, you just think you’re failing). For the past few years, you’ve been struggling with mental health issues including but not limited to: severe depression, anxiety, and PTSD. This spices up your life and makes you a whole new breed of exotic. People aren’t this exotic on purpose as it comes with horrifying side effects. Side effects of being exotic include: negative thoughts about yourself or life in general, risky behaviors such as narcotic use or alcoholic outburst or self harm, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, and, in the worst case, death. Your family doesn’t know what you went through and they definitely don’t know about your mental health. You come from one of those families that think any form of mental illness is an excuse to be lazy, but you’re exotic and you don’t choose to be. This is where things take a wrong turn.

You’ve been hiding it, these mental health issues, right? Dealing with it on your own hasn’t been warming as it’s only been getting a thousand times worse. Everything you kept hiding rushes to your head one day. Being in your own thoughts isn’t safe either (refer to side effects). So, those thoughts get overwhelming and you see your mother’s bottle of Excedrin in the family medicine cabinet when you’re home alone, a bottle in your parents’ liquor cabinet, and have a panic attack on the bathroom floor. The banding you’ve been doing for the past hour, which turned your wrist a 3D red and blue fiesta, has made you numb to the pain, so the whips you give yourself have no effect anymore and you reach for your mother’s bottle of Excedrin. “Aleve, all day strong” more like Aleve, life all gone. Your brain just shuts off and you don’t think. All you do think is how many of those white pills would it take to finish you off? Then there’s just a fuck it and dump a filled hand full into your mouth and chug swigs from the bottle. It should kill you. But the effects apparently take longer than calculated and you think the fuck? That’s it? and start to stand and walk toward the kitchen. You thought wrong. A pain shoots into your empty stomach that shoves you into the wall and keep yourself from falling because your freezing hands react better than you ever could. Your heart beat is uncontrollable. 1,2,1,2,1,2,fuck,1,2,1,2,fuck! Lub,dub,lub,dub,lub,lub,lub,dub. Your head starts to spin and your hand goes lower and lower, pushing you to the chilling granite floor, until your hands stop working too and you plop to the kitchen floor. You let out a curdling cry, screaming at yourself over and over what did you do? You hug your knees and rock back and forth like you were three again. What you’d give to be three again. Then. You go stiff. You can’t move any part of your body. What are arms? What are legs? Your breath? What is breath? You’re slipping away. 1...2...1...fu...1… lub...dub...lub… Your eyes roll back. It’s coming. Your mind goes blank. Darkness. 

You’d think this was it. That haha I tricked you and you’re actually dead, but nay nay! The darkness plays vibrant images to your rolled eyes. Replays all the happy little moments you forgot. All that laughter and smiles you once had. All the little things in life you seem to lose each day. Your plans for what future you paved in your head. That less than one hand count of people who matter in your life. Click, switch. The light comes back to your eyes and your on your kitchen floor again. Your body still isn’t working so you lay there involuntarily. Well shit what just happened? You count the dose in your dizzy brain and you think yup death should have occurred. In some way you’re relieved. In some odd way you wish it followed through. You cry and repeat sorry to yourself then your arms and legs work. 

Place the bottle of whatever back in your parents’ cabinet, walk back to the bathroom (shit you look white and blue), and place your mother’s bottle of Excedrin back in the family cabinet facing the way it was before. Nothing happened. No harm, no foul. It takes you sometime (another attempt and many panic attacks in between) before realizing you need help. You don’t tell your family. Never your family. You’re only lazy to them anyway. You start off with therapy and your therapist was nice enough to let you down softly by passing you off to a psychiatrist. I think you’d benefit better with someone more professional. That’s a good way to say you’re so fucked up it’s beyond my comprehension how to even help you. So there you go to the psychiatrist, and yup your self diagnosis is correct and they give you happiness pills. No happiness for longer than a couple of moments but it’s the process. You’re trying, really you are. You don’t want to be exotic. Then, you think about it. That day. There’s sharp pings of guilt and sadness. Somewhere along that spill something had drastically changed and you don’t fully understand why you tried to commit suicide. You got lucky, but those 123 people who did die that day didn’t.