What She Needs

22. 1-800-273-8255

TW-
SUICIDE

1-800-273-8255 by Logic.

If you know you can't read this today, please don't. Take care of yourself.

I hope this is accurate. This is not meant to be pretty. This is meant to be harrowing and off putting- deterrent if anything. If you think I'm glamorising, please let me know and I'll edit.

Meredith Grey

This feeling isn't like I thought it'd be. It's not at all like how it's portrayed in books and films. Where's the screaming... the crying.... the pill bottles and blades and any other unrealistic trope that Hollywood has perpetuated. I'm not the sobbing mess I thought I'd be. I'm vacant.

I'm not suicidal. I'm not. Suicide is the act of intentionally taking ones life. Being suicidal means you want to die.

I don't want to die. I don't know what happens after death, but I've always been told that there's no finality. You live on in some way, be it heaven or reincarnation or even just your name on someone's tongue. You live on.

I don't want to live on. I want my entire soul to disappear. As if I never walked the earth, as if I never touched other people. As if I never existed.

I just want everything to stop.

Maybe that is being suicidal, but the doctors and nurses don't understand mental illness enough to clarify it as that. Dr Garcia is very good, I'll give her that, and maybe it's my own resistance towards treatment that's got me here, but she doesn't get it. She doesn't know what it's like to be in my head and want out. It's not a case of finding breathing techniques or learning to eat again or stopping cutting.

It's finding a god damn will to live.

But I don't think that's realistic for me anymore. If it were a patient of mine, I'd encourage them to keep fighting, because maybe they're not feeling what I am. Maybe they are breathing slightly easier than me, and there's still hope for the therapy and medication to work. Maybe they aren't as stubborn as me. Maybe they have much more to live for.

Not me. I'm ready to stop now.

My mind is gone and it's just a case of getting my body to follow.

I don't think I'm the best at communicating what this experience is really like. I haven't managed to covey just how debilitated I've become. I cannot sleep, because of the swarming pit in my stomach. Every time I lay down I feel like I'm about to throw up. It's easier for me to sit bolt upright and stare at the television as some sort of empty distraction. I can't eat. The fear that my own body will betray me is too much. The feeling that I will lose all control over myself is all consuming.
I'm not even sad. It's not sadness. It's just an overwhelming bleakness. An emptiness. No desire to move or talk or breathe.

It's a constant agonising dull ache, like my bones are in a vice. I'm squeezing and squeezing every last drop of life out of my body just to get through the day.

All I want is to be able to sleep. But even that's been taken from me. To be unable to even lie down is making my life a miserable existence.

I need the fear to stop. The chills and the shakes and the vomiting and the crying and the hyperventilating. My body needs to stop now.

My mind already has.

The lights are swimming above me. My hands are gripped to the sides of the porcelain. With every undulation of the water, my view of the ceiling tiles are distorted. It's relaxing actually. I can't make out the faces in the photographs on the picture rail above me. They're just wish-washes of blurry colours.
Slowly, slowly, I start losing grip. My fingers slip to my sides, the water moving as they hit, and washing up over my face. I'm ready to open my mouth. I'm ready to breathe.