So Guys....

I'm going to be perfectly, painfully honest here; what I'm going to be talking about will make you uncomfortable. It's not an easy topic, it's deeply personal, heavily stigmatized,  and may upset you, trigger you, or offend you or your beliefs. If you believe you fall under in any of those groups or cannot hold a mature conversation about the subject I suggest you back out of this journal and find something else to look at, I certainly won't think any less of you.

Still here? Then here we go.

I should probably start by saying that this isnt a plea for help. I've had problems with suicidal ideation for years, I was confronted about it for the first time in seventh grade but I'd been thinking this way for long before that. Why am I bringing this up now? Because it's been getting worse since I started college, and I'm reaching the end of my rope. Honestly, I'm exhausted, pretending to be normal and acting accordingly is exhausting in a way that's hard to describe but is still very real. The idea of being able to just check out and be done with everything is incredibly appealing and I'm too selfish not to consider it.

Before I go further, if I've talked to or interacted with you on a regular basis and you never suspected, good. I didn't want people to know.

So why am I talking about this? Because today I dug out the bottle of ibuprofen I have, it's never been opened simply because I've never had to use it. Right now, it's sitting on my desk next to my printer, still sealed shut. But it's there. Just like the box cutter is sitting in the second drawer.

I should reiterate that I'm not asking for help. My school makes help available to those who want it, I'm far past caring. This journal is partially because I feel the need to ramble and partially because I've noticed an unfortunate pattern.

The stigma attached to mental health prevents people from discussing it openly, and I'm using my personal experience combined with the anonymity of the internet to start a conversation. You see, I've told my parents that I wanted to die before. And then spent the next day alone in the house because both of them work, and while my mom did check up on me, I got radio silence from my dad. And neither of them have revisited the topic despite the fact that it's been over a year.

Neither one of them asked if I still thought or felt that way, neither of them bothered to check if I was acting or planning on going through with it. They didnt see if I was hurting myself or any other high risk behaviors, nothing. Considering how they had to verbally corner me and force me to admit what I was thinking, there was no way I would go to them on my own, I still won't I put a lot into keeping this to myself.

Something else my parents didn't do was ask why I feel this way. It might just be that I'm studying nursing (I'm aware of the irony) but most health care professionals would tell you that when dealing with  someone who has depression or thoughts of suicide, you should ask why, find out the root of the problem and go from there. That means confronting the problem directly, acknowledging its there, and dealing with it head on. Not tiptoeing around the person for fear of upsetting them.

Judging by how hard writing this is, I can only imagine how much worse a conversation like that would be. It needs to be done though, the mental illness stigma has to go so conversations like this can happen without anyone being afraid of the impact of their words.

So it starts here, now. With me being brutally honest. I think about killing myself often and have recently taken that box cutter I mentioned earlier to my skin. This is me choosing not to hide behind a smile and the insistence that I'm fine. Say what you will, change has to start somewhere, and I might as well make my life mean something.