Learning How to Un-Hate Myself

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

Albert Camus

Guilt was like a suffocating blanket I couldn’t shed, a piece of me that clung to my body like second skin. I believed that he died because I wasn’t smart enough to see the warning signs, and that if only I had to put the pieces together faster, he would still be alive.

And so I wore that guilt around like it was the only piece of clothing in my closet.

I was so afraid of allowing myself grace in my greatest time of turmoil. I felt that if I did, I was letting myself off the hook for letting him go and make his decision.

This is on you, Dyl. Your inability to speak up when you knew something was wrong is the reason that so many people’s lives were ruined. Congrats on breaking hearts and spirits, you stupid bitch.

I fell down the rabbit hole of thinking that I had the power to change his mind. But when you are in that deeply, there is no seeing through someone else’s lenses. After all, their tunnel is too wide and yours is too narrow.

And so what I’ve learned through my own bouts of depression and rock bottoms is that the only person who has any potential to get through to you is you.

Believe me, I wish that I could have said or done something to make him want to stay. Every day, I run through the different ways I could have convinced him not to leave. Maybe cut to the future and show him the amount of pain I would be put through and forced to survive.

But even still, he probably would have done the same thing.

And that is not on me.

No matter what you may tell yourself, you are never the reason that a person you love decides to take their own life. And you never could have changed their mind once it’s been made up.

It took me a really long time to understand this because I so badly wanted to find a way to sketch in the missing answers. I wanted them to exist when my heart kept trying to tell me that they didn’t.

Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

P.D. James

There is never a reason to place the blame onto your own shoulders and convince yourself you deserve to carry around the weight.

Please trust me on this one. Because I don’t want you to suffer the way I have.

It most definitely is not fun.