Only those who’ve experienced suicidal thoughts will understand. Perhaps you’re like me. You’ve been on the “upswing” for quite awhile now. Things in your life seem to be going well. Your future excites you. Life is looking good.

And then it will strike you out of nowhere. That feeling that never goes away. It always lurks in the corners of your mind.

Everyone is different. For me, it’s “I don’t deserve to be here anymore” and “I would be doing my loved ones a favor if I was gone“. It’s immense regret and self hatred. It’s knowing that I’ve made irreversible mistakes in my life that will haunt me forever. It’s disgust when I look at myself in all aspects, despising every self realization I come to.

I struggle with my past more than I like to admit. My fuck-ups stroll along through the paths in my mind, just a few steps behind my conscious thoughts, waiting to overcome me at the slightest reminder of what I’ve done. It can be a song coming on shuffle, it can be a social media post I see, it can be as simple as looking at the blessings in my life and wondering what I’ve done to deserve them. Anything, in the right context, can send me into a downward spiral of contemplating if I should keep going or just end it all.

And it’s happening…. right now.

How do you pick yourself up when you feel like the fall was deserved? How do you bring yourself out of the darkness when you feel like it’s where you belong?

I woke up crying. Hating my appearance teamed up with over-analyzing the past to kick me down the happiness ladder that I’ve been working so hard to climb up. I thought I had been making progress, putting the past behind me and working towards a bright future. But then the desire to end it all came creeping back into the forefront of my mind, and trust me, that is something that is very hard to ignore. Suicidal thoughts are strong and they demand your attention. They yell and scream at you until you can hear nothing else.

I feel very strongly that I will never allow myself to succumb to these thoughts. The desire is there, but there would be too much collateral damage. I cannot imagine leaving my parents or my siblings. I couldn’t inflict that level of pain onto my best friends. I would never want to create devastation for others, I’d rather swim through the storm of it occurring in my own mind instead.

But battling these thoughts is hell on Earth. Wanting to disappear, wanting to be free from everything that makes you yourself… it’s almost indescribable. And it’s shameful. I have almost deleted this blog post 5 times already and I’ve only been writing for 30 minutes. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between thinking “People will judge me if they read it” and “What’s the point of exposing yourself in this way, nobody cares”.

But if this post can reach one person that feels how I do, then I am satisfied. If one person knows that I too sit here, sipping my morning coffee with tears welling up in my eyes, wanting to rid the world of my existence just like they do… then I have succeeded.

Our minds are dangerous places if you spend too much time in them. There is a fine line between being in-tune with your emotions and them consuming your mind, putting your willpower in a choke hold. For those like me, who sometimes feel it’s best to just put an end to it all, walking that fine line will be an eternal battle. While you work towards self love and acceptance, you will never be able to stop fighting the darkness within you. When you think you’ve won that is when you need to be the most on-guard. It’s almost as if suicidal thoughts can sense when you’ve reached inner peace and they come creeping up behind you, ready to push you towards the edge again.

No matter how much I hate my present and my past, the future remains untouched. The words of my story are only partially written. I cannot edit the previous chapters, but there are so many blank pages to fill. And when that little demon knocks, telling me I am not worthy of filling those blank pages, I’m going to tell it to fuck right off. I have so much more to add.

Even when you want to scratch out or cross through your story, when you want to burn the book entirely…. keep writing.