Content Warning: This story contains references to sensitive topics, including suicide and mental health struggles.
Too many times I’ve read stories about recovering from a suicidal state as if it’s an easy mindset to shift out of. As if the cure to depression grows ripe on trees and it is simply a matter of finding a ladder tall enough to reach it. In truth, the journey to the top is slow-going and the fruit bites back. Newfound happiness can feel like salvation and then rot in your hands. I had been through plenty of emotional turmoil before, but the depressive episode I experienced drained every drop of motivation out of me.
I fell into all of the unhealthy extremes. Isolated, yet clingy. Moody, yet stoic. Neurotic, yet empty. My depressed self and the self reacting to the events in my life were completely separate and battling for dominance. Both lived within me, tearing me apart with their tug-of-war. Suicide became my backdoor. My last resort. The emergency exit I could take if I became too tired of it all. It was an idea to keep me sane. Just an idea, a hypothetical and nothing more.
Hypothetical, I told myself.
Self-love is not something you can magically induce within yourself at a moment’s notice. It must be forged in fire, against all the odds life has thrown at you—and like a muscle, it can grow weak without regular use. I was so busy tending to the troubles of those around me that emotional self-care became the last thing on my mind. By the time I realised this, I had spun my own web of worries and the more I tried to unravel it, the more tangled my mental health became. The emergency exit became more and more appealing, and my life progressively felt more complicated and hopeless. But on the night when it came down to the wire, I bypassed the emergency exit and took a different route. That night, through the pain and shot nerves, I somehow found calm within myself and went to get help instead.
The night I hit rock bottom and went to the clinic, the nurses kept searching for confirmation that I wasn’t going to kill myself the moment I went home. But if that had been my plan, I would not have gone there in the first place. No one else was home and the apartment was eerily empty; it would’ve been easy. To this day, I don’t know how I made the decision to preserve my life. My memory of the incident is fuzzy now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the trauma had been pressed into the recesses of my brain. But I did make that decision, and I survived. I survived, and I’m grateful for the life I’ve continued to live.
I wish I had some wisdom to impart: a step-by-step guide on how to survive a depressive episode. All I know for sure is that I pushed through and, eventually, reached the end of the tunnel. There was no mighty revelation about wanting to live; I didn’t have a split-second metamorphosis where my depression fell off of me like a heavy cloak. I didn’t fall in love with the beauty of life or have the dark veil lifted off of me. It took time to step back into the light, and it wasn't pretty. But I lived.
