Trigger Warning: This post discusses mental health and suicide ideation.
“Nothing is ever that bad” this phrase over the last few years is something I have grown to despise.
When people have lost their battle with depression and succumbed to the overwhelming drive to not exist, that’s what people whisper isn’t it?
“Nothing is ever that bad you’d have to end your life!”
Saying that invalidates victims of depression and suicide.
I am here to tell you, the crippling weight of severe depression, is that bad.
Your brain is an enemy. Depressions progression is slow, and mild.
In the beginning unrecognizable as anything other than exhaustion, mostly. But then normal day to day activities become a little more difficult to do, until you dread getting out of bed.
Then you have small fleeting thoughts that come and go wishing you just hadn’t ever existed.
Then you wish you’d just disappear. Disappearance turns into dying.
Again all fleeting thoughts, that begin lingering longer and longer.
And consistently, but slowly progressing. Until eventually the fleeting thoughts turn into fleeting ideas. Ways you could kill yourself.
Just random, sprinkled in with all the other things. Until eventually every single day becomes consumed with wanting to die because its is all; Just. Too. Much. It is, unbearable.
It is literally too much to bare.
Going to work and pretending all day drains you so much that by the time it’s over you are too exhausted to even speak. Your body begins to ache, telling you;
“Hey, if you don’t do something about Brain, I am shutting down too!”
But at this point, your brain has told you, nothing will help. This is who you are and what you life is.
Now all of the sudden you’re making a plan, and you keep that in your back pocket for a while… curating it, making it perfect and seamless in your mind. Justifying it.
Hoping one day you wake up normal and it all goes away, while at the same time accepting this is your fate.
With the back up plan of suicide, right there, in case you need it.
In case everything becomes so difficult and it has completely consumed all of your thoughts and actions.
And then your plan begins to progress, you add a where and when to the how you’ve been hanging on to.
“Maybe just after those family photos, so they have that to remember me.”
Then you shut out the idea of family and loved ones. Ignore thoughts of how they will feel or react to the news of you ending your life. Or maybe prematurely spite them for saying
“nothing could have been that bad.”
I was lucky enough to be able to fight off, what felt like, the inevitable just long enough.
Before I put my plan into action, I got help. I had people who depended on me and needed me to live. And that obligation kept me alive just long enough to live.
My life, outside looking in, was beautiful.
It is a beautiful life. No one else could see, but inside my head it was that bad.
If you are struggling from depression I am validating you- it is that bad. But this isn’t how it it has to be, despite what your brain has told you- help, helps!
If you know someone struggling with depression of any kind help them to get help, because they may not be able to do it them selves.
If you are thinking about harming yourself or attempting suicide, tell someone who can help right away. Call the toll-free, 24-hour hotline of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255) to be connected to a trained counselor at a suicide crisis center nearest you.