When you're sure you've had enough . . .

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When I was younger, I seriously considered killing myself, on several occasions - I admit this with a little shame, as it feels like a bad thing to consider doing, to me. Brave, perhaps, and decisive too . . . but essentially histrionic and ungrateful. I felt ashamed to be thinking about any such thing, and certainly would never have told anyone I felt that way, but that didn't alter the fact that I felt sure my family would be much happier if I had never been born. I felt that I ruined life for my mother and my sister, by inadvertently sending my father into violent rages, and that my peers at school saw me as nothing other than an object of ridicule. I was very confused and unhappy, and would find myself day-dreaming about bringing the whole scenario crashing about my ears with a judicious pill, or a well-placed knife.

I once went as far as planning to run away (where, I didn't know: I never said these were good plans) and let whatever was coming to me come, even if it was death in a gutter somewhere. I attached a note to my best bracelet, and left it on my sister's bedside table - it said 'I'll really miss you. Please don't turn out like me.' I packed some things that seemed important at the time, but that now have a comic plangency - slippers, a stuffed toy cat, a collection of ornamental beads - and I went out onto the driveway. I never went through with leaving, because something stopped me, like a hand on the shoulder, and with more awareness than usual I took in some channel of inexpressibility that made me realise that there was perhaps more to living than I had yet experienced. I would like to say that it was the stars, or the vastness and stillness of the night, or some other platitudinous immensement that slapped my addled brain into alignment . . . and in some odd way, it was - but mixed with a harmony of light and distant car sounds that spoke at once of drudgery and the ineffable beauty of life as it is made up of the tiny little occurrences and actions that each turn this way and that, like leaves on a tree, or iridescent fish in a shoal of many duplicates. Whatever it was, I didn't run away, and I didn't stab myself in the neck or slit my wrists, and I didn't take all of the tablets in the medicine cupboard, and I certainly didn't hang myself from the light fitting with a belt (which somehow always struck me as the most intimidating and demanding method of suicide). I did none of these things, because each time I was on the verge of it, I was beckoned back by this emotionless, hugely complex spectre of nameless radiance and meaning. I didn't know where I was being beckoned to, but I hung on with the nebulous hope that one day I would.

Now years later, amongst the settled rubble of a life lived among ruins, I do know. I was being led to a time when I could begin to be forgiving of what has passed, grateful for what I have, hopeful for what might be and to a state of mind where I could begin to sleep soundly at night knowing that the things that made me miserable as a child weren't my fault. I can enjoy the love and friendship I have now because I deserve them. It would have helped me a lot, back then, to be able to tell myself that one day I would begin to feel worthy of life - which is, I suppose, my whole point: things are never so bad that you can't begin to heal, and there is no-one here who doesn't deserve happiness, love and friendship too. That we don't always have them is a testimony to circumstance, or to the cruelty and inadequacy of others, but it is never because we are undeserving, worthless people. Everyone here, who feels that everything is wrong (and sometimes it is) should know that.

I'm really glad that I stayed here.

of this life, well hang on

Well said. I hope everyone here reads this.

Thank You.
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