An open letter to all the people who have judged someone for believing
they are faking mental health issues to seek attention; I want you to open your mind for a
few minutes, and try and believe what life might be like for people with a
different reality to yours.
Today I checked my emails, a fairly normal activity, and I had a look in my Saved box. What I found was many, many suicide notes, written over the last 3 months. I had deleted any from before that, thankfully, if they were impossible to delete I would probably have hundreds.
I read a few, and two things struck me. The first is that I feel like I’m reading someone else’s words; I can understand the emotions and I remember writing them, but it doesn’t feel like me. The second thing is how much these notes vary. Some sound like desperate cries for help, one even says ‘I need you to help me’ and ends with ‘Help me’ yet it is still a goodbye. Even in the times where I believe I don’t even have 24 hours to live, I know I want help. I don’t know what the help is, or where it would come from, but in an email which I know will probably never be read, I still want to try.
Two of these notes break my heart to read. The first goes through each of my closest friends with a final message to them. It isn’t written with desperation or sadness, it is just resolved and accepting of my imminent parting of this life. It tries to help each friend through my death, remind them that it’ll never be their fault, that they really did do all they could, and that they deserve everything the world can offer them. It is beautifully written, and when I read each note I can feel my entire personality having been poured into it. I had nothing left at the moments of writing these, they were the use of my last energy, and I had found a reserve of the essence of who I am in an attempt to give my closest friends a part of me and to help a part of them.
The final one, though, is the worst. It is a letter written to me, from me. It is a reminder from the girl who is at rock bottom, to the girl who might see a glimmer of hope, that it would be selfish of me to live, and that I have no choice but to take my own life. It is me pleading with myself to put me out of this pain, it is me making a logical argument and desperately asking myself to go through with my own plans even if that means ignoring a moment of feeling ‘better’.
I am in my early 20s, and I have spent the last 7 years struggling with the intensity of my disordered emotions. In that time I have been told by the people around me that I need to accept I’m just being attention seeking, that this will pass because I will ‘grow up’, that I’ve chosen this as a way to manipulate the people around me, and that when I choose to be ‘normal’ I will be. I have been told my medical and mental health professionals that I’m like this because I’m gay, that I can’t be mentally ill because I’m well dressed, that my only hope is prayer and turning to god, that I have made attempts at my own life enough times that that they think I will die by suicide, and that I’m ‘sane but just quite messed up’.
With each of these comments, I felt as if I was holding a great deal of pain and struggle in my hands, a struggle which I have been fighting against for years, and someone had approached me, looked at one corner of that struggle and flicked it, then walked away with a smirk on their face thinking about what to make for lunch. That is how unimportant I was to them.
The trouble with mental health problems is that they can’t be seen, and to those who haven’t experienced them there isn’t any visible evidence of the suffering. How could someone who has not been through it start to understand it. This means that the struggling victims of this nasty, nasty problem, are left feeling alone and even more distanced from the rest of the population. So, perhaps, those suffering want evidence that their problems can be seen. Perhaps they cut into their own skin, which I can tell you is incredibly painful and upsetting, and if they let you see those wounds then they are not casually trying to manipulate you into giving them attention, they are trying to show you’re the only visible part of their mental torment which exists.
Imagine you had been stabbed in the ribs and were in immense pain and asked a friend for help and they told you it would be better tomorrow, just distract yourself. You lie awake at night in pain, and you struggle to concentrate on any of the responsibilities you have, yet the people around you tell you that they can’t see the wound, it’s not there. But you know it is there, you can feel it and see it. What would you do to get them to see what you see and help your pain go away? You might cry. You might try and numb the pain with alcohol. And after weeks when it hasn’t healed at all, you might cut yourself just to see whether you can even feel other pain, to see if it can take away the stabbing pain, and when your friend sees and offers you help, you will accept it. It won’t get rid of the initial injury, but you are at least being helped with something. And when it has been months years and the pain never left, you might actually decide that you can’t live like this anymore. The constant pain, the lack of ability to do life properly, it’s not a pain you can handle. It’s at the heart of you, it’s in everything you do. When you’re happy, it’s despite the pain, it’s not instead of it. You’ve seen so many Drs, you’ve been referred so many times, yet it’s just you at the end of the day, lying awake in pain.
I would understand if that person decided to take their own life. If you would understand too, then perhaps you can understand a tiny part of mental health and suicide.
It’s lonely, and waking up to a letter from yourself asking you to take your own life and end the pain is bound to leave anyone feeling weak and afraid. So you can try and tell me that talking about my mental illness, that self-harming, that overdosing, my writing suicide notes, is attention seeking. And every time I will reply that maybe I am seeking some attention, but that’s not because I am weak or pathetic, it’s because I am being as brave as hell and I’m showing you the most vulnerable painful part of me in a desperate attempt to save my life and not put you through the pain of dealing with my death.
So perhaps, just perhaps, you should re-consider the way you accept my illness, and if the metaphorical 'stab wound' in my ribs doesn’t seem to heal in a normal amount of time, please just stick by me. Because when it does heal and I get my life back, I am going to be so proud, and I am going to shine brighter than you knew a human could shine.
Yours sincerely,
Today I checked my emails, a fairly normal activity, and I had a look in my Saved box. What I found was many, many suicide notes, written over the last 3 months. I had deleted any from before that, thankfully, if they were impossible to delete I would probably have hundreds.
I read a few, and two things struck me. The first is that I feel like I’m reading someone else’s words; I can understand the emotions and I remember writing them, but it doesn’t feel like me. The second thing is how much these notes vary. Some sound like desperate cries for help, one even says ‘I need you to help me’ and ends with ‘Help me’ yet it is still a goodbye. Even in the times where I believe I don’t even have 24 hours to live, I know I want help. I don’t know what the help is, or where it would come from, but in an email which I know will probably never be read, I still want to try.
Two of these notes break my heart to read. The first goes through each of my closest friends with a final message to them. It isn’t written with desperation or sadness, it is just resolved and accepting of my imminent parting of this life. It tries to help each friend through my death, remind them that it’ll never be their fault, that they really did do all they could, and that they deserve everything the world can offer them. It is beautifully written, and when I read each note I can feel my entire personality having been poured into it. I had nothing left at the moments of writing these, they were the use of my last energy, and I had found a reserve of the essence of who I am in an attempt to give my closest friends a part of me and to help a part of them.
The final one, though, is the worst. It is a letter written to me, from me. It is a reminder from the girl who is at rock bottom, to the girl who might see a glimmer of hope, that it would be selfish of me to live, and that I have no choice but to take my own life. It is me pleading with myself to put me out of this pain, it is me making a logical argument and desperately asking myself to go through with my own plans even if that means ignoring a moment of feeling ‘better’.
I am in my early 20s, and I have spent the last 7 years struggling with the intensity of my disordered emotions. In that time I have been told by the people around me that I need to accept I’m just being attention seeking, that this will pass because I will ‘grow up’, that I’ve chosen this as a way to manipulate the people around me, and that when I choose to be ‘normal’ I will be. I have been told my medical and mental health professionals that I’m like this because I’m gay, that I can’t be mentally ill because I’m well dressed, that my only hope is prayer and turning to god, that I have made attempts at my own life enough times that that they think I will die by suicide, and that I’m ‘sane but just quite messed up’.
With each of these comments, I felt as if I was holding a great deal of pain and struggle in my hands, a struggle which I have been fighting against for years, and someone had approached me, looked at one corner of that struggle and flicked it, then walked away with a smirk on their face thinking about what to make for lunch. That is how unimportant I was to them.
The trouble with mental health problems is that they can’t be seen, and to those who haven’t experienced them there isn’t any visible evidence of the suffering. How could someone who has not been through it start to understand it. This means that the struggling victims of this nasty, nasty problem, are left feeling alone and even more distanced from the rest of the population. So, perhaps, those suffering want evidence that their problems can be seen. Perhaps they cut into their own skin, which I can tell you is incredibly painful and upsetting, and if they let you see those wounds then they are not casually trying to manipulate you into giving them attention, they are trying to show you’re the only visible part of their mental torment which exists.
Imagine you had been stabbed in the ribs and were in immense pain and asked a friend for help and they told you it would be better tomorrow, just distract yourself. You lie awake at night in pain, and you struggle to concentrate on any of the responsibilities you have, yet the people around you tell you that they can’t see the wound, it’s not there. But you know it is there, you can feel it and see it. What would you do to get them to see what you see and help your pain go away? You might cry. You might try and numb the pain with alcohol. And after weeks when it hasn’t healed at all, you might cut yourself just to see whether you can even feel other pain, to see if it can take away the stabbing pain, and when your friend sees and offers you help, you will accept it. It won’t get rid of the initial injury, but you are at least being helped with something. And when it has been months years and the pain never left, you might actually decide that you can’t live like this anymore. The constant pain, the lack of ability to do life properly, it’s not a pain you can handle. It’s at the heart of you, it’s in everything you do. When you’re happy, it’s despite the pain, it’s not instead of it. You’ve seen so many Drs, you’ve been referred so many times, yet it’s just you at the end of the day, lying awake in pain.
I would understand if that person decided to take their own life. If you would understand too, then perhaps you can understand a tiny part of mental health and suicide.
It’s lonely, and waking up to a letter from yourself asking you to take your own life and end the pain is bound to leave anyone feeling weak and afraid. So you can try and tell me that talking about my mental illness, that self-harming, that overdosing, my writing suicide notes, is attention seeking. And every time I will reply that maybe I am seeking some attention, but that’s not because I am weak or pathetic, it’s because I am being as brave as hell and I’m showing you the most vulnerable painful part of me in a desperate attempt to save my life and not put you through the pain of dealing with my death.
So perhaps, just perhaps, you should re-consider the way you accept my illness, and if the metaphorical 'stab wound' in my ribs doesn’t seem to heal in a normal amount of time, please just stick by me. Because when it does heal and I get my life back, I am going to be so proud, and I am going to shine brighter than you knew a human could shine.
Yours sincerely,
Someone who’s reality is not very nice, but it’s still my
reality.
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