The Letter I Needed When I Was Suicidal
content warning: frank discussions of suicidal ideation
To you, and past me, in the midst of overwhelming suicidality:
I will start this by saying the thing that everyone says to you, but the difference between them and me is that I have proof: you will feel better.
What a radical concept! You’ll never feel better, right? You’ll never feel like you truly want to be alive! You’ll never know what it’s like to actually want to grow old! You have a deadline: at age xx, if I’m still alive, I will kill myself. You can’t fathom the thought of growing up, of growing older, of having to somehow endure this world for years and years more.
I don’t know where you are or who you are or what your situation is. But I’m here to tell you not only “it will get better” but also “here’s proof.” How many times, over and over and over again, did someone tell you, “It will be okay”, “You will feel better”, “This too shall pass”? And how many times did you yell, in your head or out loud, NO IT WON’T. IT WON’T EVER GET BETTER AND I WILL SUFFER MY WHOLE LIFE AND I WILL NEVER FEEL OKAY.
I know it, I do, I really really do. Please believe me. I know exactly how you feel. I’m not here to say, “Oh yeah, I was a little depressed and my doctor gave me Wellbutrin and I felt so much better!” Oh no. I’m here to say, “I was wildly and aggressively suicidal and I went to so so many therapists and psychiatrists and I tried so so many medications and nothing ever made it better.” And then I did get better. I’m here as proof that no matter how much you won’t believe it, no matter how much you know you will never feel okay, you will.
Hello, my name is Michelle and I am no longer suicidal. I can’t tell you exactly how that happened, or what you can do to cure your own suicidality, but I can tell you that it will go away. You will feel better. You will want to be alive, and in fact, you will get to the point where you love being alive, where you cherish every second you’re alive, where you think back and realize you are so glad you didn’t kill yourself back then. And here’s how I know:
I was suicidal for my whole life. Whenever a mental health professional asks when it started, I tell them about being in fifth grade and thinking about how good it would feel to stab a dagger through my chest. Not that my suicidality started in fifth grade, not at all. I cannot remember a time I didn’t think that I was better off dead. The world hurt, too much and too often. My brain is a very logical place and it loved to remind me that if at any point the suffering of life outweighed the goodness of life, it made sense to kill myself. I had to kill myself, because it would be absurd and illogical otherwise. After all, my life was the only thing I truly owned and I should be able to decide if I wanted to keep living it! And while I rarely considered myself “suicidal,” because I never had an active plan to kill myself, I did spend a great deal of time wishing I was dead.
I remember when I learned that not everyone wished they were dead most of the time. I was talking to my friends in high school and through our conversation I realized that they actually wanted to be alive. They didn’t think that life was horrible and not worth living. And so I felt very alone, because the one thing that had been keeping me going was the thought that everyone felt the way I did.
I started therapy and medication my senior year of high school, which… didn’t really make anything better. I went to college, found friends, had fun, did pretty good in school. Objectively, I was doing great. Sure, my mental health was a mess, but whose wasn’t? Everyone I knew was depressed sometimes, had anxiety sometimes. But I never found someone who lived every second of every day knowing there was a solution to their problems if they could just… do it.
And here I’ll tell you one way in which I may seem different — “better” — than you: I never attempted suicide. I wanted to, so so many times, but I had something to live for. You might too; in fact, I assume you do, if you’re alive and reading this. Whatever it is that is keeping you alive — hold on to it. Rely on it. It may be unhealthy now, but if it keeps you alive, it’s worth it.
For me, it was my parents. They are incredible, loving, amazing people. Every time I felt like I really really could not live anymore, I thought of them. How much that would hurt them. How painful it would be for them, who loved me unconditionally. And that kept me alive. It isn’t reliable in the long-term — I had promised myself that I would kill myself once my parents died — but it kept me alive.
I did go to the hospital once. I took myself there. I remember so vividly the absurdity of the situation: I was in my bedroom in my apartment after driving 10 hours on a road trip. My friends were in the living room, right next to my bedroom. I was exhausted and stressed. They were laughing and having fun. I seethed in my resentment, in my feeling left out, in knowing they hated me and didn’t want to hang out with me. I knew, to the very core of my being, that I didn’t deserve to be alive and that I was only hurting people the longer I stayed alive. I poured out my bottle of Xanax in my hand, thinking What would happen if I took all of them? Would I die? Or would I just pass out, go into a coma, get brain damage? In that moment, I thought I can go to the hospital. Then people will know. Then they’ll understand, pity me, love me, take care of me. I got out of bed, put on my slippers and coat, grabbed my keys, and walked out my bedroom door and out the apartment door. I heard one of my friends say, “Was that Michelle? Where is she going?” and I almost stopped, almost turned back and said “Please help me I’m hurting” but I didn’t. I got in my car and drove to the nearest hospital.
I now know that had I just walked into that room with my friends, I would have felt so much better and would have felt loved and cherished. But the problem with living with a brain like mine, and like yours, too, I assume, is that it does everything it can to convince you that life is not worth living. That everything you think is supposed to make you happy and feel good actually doesn’t exist. Everyone hates you. You’re bad at everything you do. You’ll never amount to anything, never find happiness, never find love. These are lies and your brain is lying to you.
Going to the hospital did not help me. (In fact it made things much worse, but that is another story.) What it did do was give me perspective. It taught me that no one else is going to fix me. There’s no magic solution that someone somewhere has that will make me feel better immediately. But I hated learning that lesson and it made me despair even more, because if no one else could fix me, and I couldn’t fix myself, how was I supposed to keep moving forward?
And yet I kept moving through life, very depressed, hating most of it, and staying alive through no fault of my own, with the hopes that somehow, someway, I would find happiness. I graduated college, faced the real world, and got even more overwhelmed. Everything was awful. Everything was scary, and I didn’t want to be alive, and everything hurt so much, and why couldn’t anyone do anything about it!!
For me, the turning point came when I sort of overhauled my life. Not that you need to do all these things to help yourself, but for me, it was (1) starting grad school, (2) getting off all my anti-depressants and birth control, (3) getting a job that kept me busy, (4) getting into a relationship after being single for three years, and (5) cutting all my hair off (no joke). I had found things that made me excited to wake up. I was meeting new people and reconnecting with my old friends. I now had hope for my future. Maybe I could actually do the thing! Maybe I could make a living doing something creative! I learned that I needed to actually work at things in order to get good at them, and that included my mental health. I started allowing myself to be happy, and I felt, well, good. That’s not to say that I was 100% cured. Not at all. I still felt down, I still had occasional thoughts of killing myself. (And it’s not that any of those things “cured” me — I’m no longer in that relationship or at that job, I’m on different medications now, I’m growing my hair out, and I graduate in six months.)
But here’s the best part (and I’m crying as I type this): It’s been two years since that all happened and I haven’t felt like killing myself in at least a year. I have hardly even thought about it. I never never never thought this would happen. I had been living my life with the absolute knowledge that I would die by suicide. And now I’m not, and I don’t want to kill myself, and I want to be alive. I love being alive! The world is scary and it hurts a lot. But it’s also beautiful and full of love and kindness and contentment, and I want to live in it for as long as I can.
So if you are suffering the way I was, let me tell you: it gets better. And I’m telling you that from lived experience. You will feel better. You will feel happy. I promise.
Love,
Michelle
