When I was in the 8th grade I was walking home from junior high school and I wanted to die. I wanted to kill myself and the entire walk home my thoughts were on how I can kill myself. This walk home was only 10 minutes of my life. In these 10 minutes I was thinking how I could do it. How does a 13-year-old girl take her own life? I know that my parents medicine cabinet had a bunch of pills. How did I know that would be a way to die is seriously beyond me? In my thoughts though I was to go to my parent’s medicine cabinet and take whatever pills where in there. When I got home, I went straight to their bathroom and opened the cabinet. To my disappointment there was hardly anything worthy for my plan to happen. It was a lot of headache and allergy meds and I just remember thinking that these would not work. Too common and too many to take; would it even get the job done? And I ask again, how in the hell does a 13-year-old girl know how to kill herself or that it would not work? I think after seeing there was nothing I could use, that I went downstairs and took a nap. As an adult those naps in my life after such dark thoughts were very much a true sign of depression that I can see now. As an 8th grader though, those dark thoughts were this huge demon inside of me and I had no idea why I had it, how to tell anyone those dark thoughts and basically felt very alone even though I was surrounded by so many people, young and old, that loved and supported me.
I vividly remember wanting to kill myself but vaguely remember the specific reason of why I wanted to die. I mean what happened that day that I was ready to end everything? What was so big and so terrible that my young mind had such horrible thoughts? In 8th grade was I that selfish and think that much of myself in the world that it would be better to not be there at all? Or was it that I had no self-confidence and thought that little of my own life and these depressed feelings were simply too much to deal with. This walk home has been one of those very notable times in my past that defined me. I knew something was wrong with me at a very early age. I was different and my thoughts and feelings were bigger than me.
So why at thirteen years old was my mind so sad? I do not remember knowing the word depression at this point in my life. I do not think my friend had told me about being diagnosed with manic depression yet. To my best memory that was going into high school and my mind’s eye is remembering this walk in the early part of 8th grade; fall/winter season. It was not as though I remember something bad that happened that day in school. I do not remember an incident that happened to make me feel so sad or anyone that did or said something mean or bad to me. I just remember feeling very, very sad and wanting that feeling to end so I decided to kill myself on my walk home from school.
We all know that kids are dramatic. They are just small humans learning about life and how to handle it. Was this feeling of wanting to simply die something that came up because of something I saw on TV? Did us girls in the cafeteria share dark secrets and someone else had spoken of wanting to die? Did I learn about suicide from something I read? Did I learn about suicide from someone else that had wanted to die? Junior high school is a lot of over developed bodies and underdeveloped minds and no idea of how to deal with emotions. It is a time where everyone sees the body, and no one really pays attention to the minds. People excuse actions and behaviors as hormonal and just being a kid. While this is true for a lot, I am certain that some must be looked at a little more. Some must conclude with openness and honesty that something bigger has a hold over this kid. But how would anyone had taken my opening up to them and sharing this suicidal thought as something to be alarmed by? Most parents or adults would never want to believe their kid could think such things or be so terrible. Why do people have to look at it from that perspective though? Why do people want to put these thoughts and feelings in a corner or under a blanket? I want to live in a world where those kinds of thoughts could be acknowledged and discussed. I always look back at my past and wonder what it would have looked like with society not judging me but embracing me and helping me see the light. What a wonderful world where having a mental illness was not just masked but it was embraced as a character of personality or something like that.
All my life I have never found the answers to these questions. Looking back now and writing about this is just cementing the fact that I knew I was different. I knew I had something inside of me that was not good. It was not pretty, and it was so controlling that even in my safe, secure and practically perfect looking life, behind it all was a very dark mind. It was a mind that always saw negative and always saw sadness in those quiet times.
If you are a parent reading this, then you are probably thinking how would I know if my kid has ever thought like this before? If you are a kid and reading this maybe you can relate. Maybe you have felt the darkness consume you and you do not know why. I encourage you to share with a trusted adult. Well in my mid-life mind I believe 2 things about this walk home and why I wanted to die. The first is I was just depressed. Some people have a mental illness and there is no explanation of why they are overtaken by their negative thoughts. The other reason is because I was lost and had no truth behind why. I knew that my Dad was not my biological father. I knew that when I was 3/4/5ish years-old my Dad adopted me from my biological father. Except I never knew the truth behind why or the truth of exactly what happened. I knew that my sisters were really my half sisters and I knew that my Mom supported this adoption but that is all I knew. This very big truth of my past and who I am and the making of me was a lie to the rest of the world. To the rest of the world, even my sisters, I was born from my Mom and Dad. I was loved so much by this man that he wanted to make me his own, as if he was my biological father. My Mom and him had my birth certificate changed to his last name and his name read on the certificate as biological father. My Dad was so proud and so selfish that he never wanted anyone to call me his stepdaughter. So, for most of my life I lived with this secret of who I really was. I lived with the knowledge of my biological father signing me over to another man and walking away from me. In my small human mind in junior high, I was someone that was not loved enough and had to be thrown into someone else’s world. Yet I was so loved that a man wanted to claim me for his own and not tell anyone, including me the entire truth.
I could truly trace this sadness I felt because I remember getting in fights with my Dad and yelling at him, you are not my real Dad. I figure this must be the source of me wanting to die. But how can not being loved, yet being so loved so much make you want to die? It cannot. It may hold sadness, anger or betrayal but the root of my dark, unhappy thoughts was just that, my roots. I was depressed and sad sometimes. It was so bad that in various times in my life it consumed me to the point of isolation and wanting to end my life. Another idea I have thought about, as to why I was so sad, was because by 8th grade I had moved 3 times in 4 years. I moved while going into 5th grade, going into 6th grade and then going into 7th grade. Those a very important years for a child to find themselves and start to figure out who they are as a person that is not a baby anymore but a growing kid. I bring this into the mix as it is another layer of who I am. Another layer that shaped and defined me. There is so much at play here. I mean what is nature vs. nurture; what is putting a child through high stress situations and just assuming they are okay? There are so many layers but from my non-Doctor mind, I believe in my roots was just a mental illness. The multiple layers at play have had an affect on who I am but at the root was a mental illness. I was not formally tested for a mental illness until I was 27 years old and again at 38. I know, crazy?!! For a person like me that had all the feelings and thoughts and knew something was different about me, no one had made me get formally tested until then. So, in my heart I feel that a mental illness grew with my childhood and through into adulthood. Mix that with the layer of my biological father, the layer of the lies, the layer of me moving so often and what we have here is a hot mess! All joking aside, we had a little human that needed help, support and guidance and had I been able to get such help, what a different life I would have grown into. If society had welcomed differences and encouraged so much more, expression of feelings and especially expression of the dark thoughts and feelings, then maybe I would have had the opportunity to grow into someone else. Someone that was not still peeling layers back at 42. Having a hold of my mental illness at a younger age, what if…..
The school years ahead was of course filled with my thoughts telling me that I was not good enough, I was sad and even though I was laughing with all my friends and in the center of social groups, all of it felt like an act. All of it I felt alone, and I knew I needed something, I needed help, but I had no idea for what and not knowing what was wrong was half the battle and the other half was getting that help as a teenager. My impulsive actions or my loud, aggressive fights with my parents were a constant in my childhood. I was a talkative child. In my elementary years I always had my name on the top right corner of the chalkboard. Many times, with multiple check marks next to it. Because of this kind of behavior, I did things and said things before thinking. The older I got, junior high and high school years, the more regretful I was with some of those behaviors. I would be embarrassed that I did them or wish that I would not have. Impulsiveness in a mentally ill human is a sneaky demon that for me I did not meet until my late twenties.
I do not recall another suicide thought that I remembered as a child quite like that 8th grade walk home from school day. I recall a ton of impulsive mistakes and a ton of dark, quiet moments but nothing that warranted me ending my life. I still wonder what about that day, what had me wanting to kill myself, but again, knowing my illness now, it was just my illness that had warranted the dark thought of death, nothing more and nothing less. My first decade with psychiatrists, they always said that I am not my illness and I always thought but I am ill so how can that be? Was this just yet another way society was saying that being mentally ill is a bad thing? That you are mentally ill, but you are not your illness. Like you have this but do not let it define you, do not share it and do not let it take over. Because right now, now at 42, I feel like I am becoming whole and wanting to share this side of me. I am fully accepting that I have a mental illness. It is mental illness that shaped who I am. I am seeing the big picture of my past; I am proud that I am owning my present and shaping my future and doing all of this with mental illness as a top layer to be loved, to be proud, to be cautious of and to own it.
Here is to Junior High Kiddos around the world, stay strong and keep moving forward.
Layers 