What They Don’t Tell You (After You Survive A Suicide Attempt)

Dear You,

It’s your twentieth birthday. Which means you’ve escaped the jungle of teenhood, with all your limbs in tack. You’re alive… well barely. You’re tired, exhausted and have given up more in your previous nineteen years that turning the big 2-0 just wasn’t as fun to celebrate.

Hear me out. You’re grown-ish. 

You’ve lived life like the adult you now legally are when you weren’t supposed to be one.

You watched your grandmother struggle to support you and your siblings. You’ve watched everyone in your inner circle move past you and accomplish the biggest milestones in life like getting their first kiss, watched your friends get in and out of relationships like changing underwear, and listened to their stories about having sex for the first time, and providing a shoulder to cry on when things in your friends life didn’t go right.

You were that friend.

Except, you aren’t in high school anymore. 

Hell, you aren’t even in college. 

You’re just stuck.

Unmotivated, tired and stuck. But, you’re twenty. You’ve made it to twenty even when you thought you’d only make it sixteen.

Remember, those times you cried in your pillow and stayed holed up in your room for hours on end staring at your walls, being surrounded by darkness? Remember, having no friends and no one to talk to, and the self-harm and the eating disorder? Remember, the first time you tried to kill your self? And then the second time and how you almost succeeded?

Hospitals visits, and inpatient, and different therapists and your story about your inner pain that everyone ignored because “you were too young to have an opinion about it.” 

Remember, waking up the morning after you tried to kill yourself? You were covered in a filthy gown and in and out of consciousness, and then you woke up and you vomited, and how your sister held your hand and stayed quiet; even stayed until five in the morning even though she had work the next day.

Remember, the heart monitors and the nurses coming in at all hours of the night checking to see if you did any damage to heart? You almost did. God, you were so close.

You’ve been through pain that no one can ever ask you to relive or recount, when you look back at these last nineteen years of existence you’ll only see the pain and the hurt. Not, that you graduated high school and even though you didn’t finish college you still got in, and even though you lost friends, you gained more support and love in the last six months than ever before, and, even though you tried to end your life, you didn’t succeed.

You are still here. You didn’t think you’d make it this far, but you’ve got luck on your side, or maybe it’s God. Don’t forget that, you are becoming a whole person day by day, and coming into your own.

Oh, and happy birthday.

All The Love, N