Trigger Warning: Depression, Suicide
Does God love me? Is there anything left of me to love? Can God love something so overwhelmingly temporary?
Reading the lines of my suicide plans has proven to be a bit heavy.
It’s strange to look back the dark months before school started. I was preparing to go to the college of my dreams. Yes, the year was shit, and the depression had worsened, and hope slipped through my fingers like sand, but it was going to change. I was going to leave home, start over, and find myself. I just had to hold on one more month.
I started to spiral in April. My mom started calling more doctors, trying to help me. The soonest they could see me was the last day was July.
Even today, it’s hard not to feel guilty that I couldn’t wait til then. It was July 10th, dammit, surely I could get over my sadness for another twenty-one days.
But depression is not just sadness. Depression is overwhelming, and deteriorating, and breaking. And I was breaking.
That week in the psych ward is still a blur to me. It’s nothing like in the movies, and yet like everything in the movies. There’s confusion, and tears, and laughter, and too much time. I spent my days doing puzzles, journaling, trying to find myself, trying to convince myself that I hadn’t made a mistake in not killing myself.
Some days I still have to convince myself that wasn’t a mistake.
Everything is temporary. How do I exist when everything is temporary? I’ve spent the past few days in bliss. Life was more than temporary. But now I am here and it is time to go back. Back to the temporary.
Does anything matter anymore?
These days, I’m different. It’s only been six months, but I know I’ve changed. Being here has given me purpose. Making new friends, finding God, learning that I am actually worthy of life…it’s new to me. I’m still not good at it. I still have episodes, days where the sadness paralyzes my body, nights of panic that chokes me til sunrise.
But I love that sunrise.
It’s temporary. I know it is.
Yet I can always count on it the next day.
