This article is dedicated to my sister, Kyra, who was beside me through it all. Even in my darkest moments you were always the reason to keep on living. With my forever apologies for an adolescence interrupted.
And to Stefan, who has shown me a love so epic that it makes me grateful every day that I did not leave this world before having experienced it.
If you check the hospital intake records for that day, you’ll find my name—filed in “child and adolescent mental health intake,” most probably under the heading of “suicidal.” Those hospital intake records, and the four years of succeeding psychiatry notes are the only public record of my ongoing battle with clinical depression and various anxiety disorders, but the private records of it are written all over the insides of my brain, and those of the people I love who have suffered with me. This story is my attempt to make my private records public, in the hopes that in hearing my story (and knowing that I am still alive and managing, in fact doing well), even one person suffering in silence will find a way to ask for help, and will cling to the hope that they too will one day be okay.
It was September 20th. I remember this, and I remember that I was wearing a sweatshirt from the university that I desperately wanted to go to. The pursuit of this dream, and the stress I put myself under (I emphasize this because there are others who unfortunately are put under this stress by their families, friends, or communities, and this was not the case with me) trying to be worthy of this institution likely contributed in large part to the onset of my depression. I had set such impossible goals for myself that I set myself up for failure—I made the nearly fatal mistake of forgetting I was only human, and an extremely young one at that. My pediatrician looked at me with worry as she paused, took a deep breath, and asked me if I was suicidal. The lights in the emergency room flickered and flushed the room in a sterile fluorescent lighting. The psychiatrist on-call was wearing Tory Burch pumps. I remember these small details, but the rest of that day is very blurry because that is what the mind does to protect itself when it has been through trauma—it suppresses. To this day, the first few months of my fight for my life are still difficult to recall.
There have been some who have said that I was never truly suicidal because I did not make a physical attempt on my life. What they don’t know is how close I was;
How hard it is to fight when your brain and body
are in combat with the basic human instinct to survive.
How I vividly I envisioned stepping in front of a train, or
simply falling out of the second floor window of my high school dorm room.