Reflections Of A Different Sort {Pt. 1 Long}

It's 11:09 at night. I've had a very busy weekend and Monday due to a bunch of different things all rolled into one. I sit down at the computer to read a few blogs from my Dashboard and the first thing I see is this post by Semper Gumby...the Return of Sunshine. I had no idea what she was talking about at first so I followed the link she posted, A Final Goodbye and I started reading. Then I started crying.

I don't know Jessica personally, but when you are shown tiny slivers of a person's life you feel that you know a part of them, even if it's just the part they want to be shown. I read people's blogs and I feel connected in a way that is really hard to explain, especially to people who don't blog. My husband does look at me strangely sometimes when I say "Oh yeah one of my friends...well a girl that I read her blog said...blah blah blah"

Suicide is a very touchy subject for me. I have seriously tried to commit suicide when I was younger, and the thought of killing myself still has found me even after becoming a wife and mother. Sometimes I just want the easy way out. Sometimes I would love not to feel anything anymore. Sometimes I would love to just float from the pain of this world to the bliss of heaven.

I am blogging about this because if there is someone out there reading this blog and feeling the same connectedness that I feel towards you when I read your blog, and you are depressed or thinking of suicide please know that you are not alone. I've been there as have many others I think.

I have never blogged about this before because it is very very personal stuff that hurts to rehash at times. I'm sure by the time I'm done writing I will have tears streaming down my cheeks and my neck. Either way I feel like this is the time to really show off a few of my demons if it means I could help someone else with theirs.

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I was a pretty wild child in my early teen years. My mom is blind and I took advantage of that and the fact that she owned a restaurant and was gone all the time. I'm not sure if she saw the signs and chose not to see them because I was her baby girl, or if I was just really good at hiding my thoughts and feelings. Either way when I was 12 years old I was "dating" older guys. I mean really older. One of my boyfriends was 21. He thought I was 16, but still. Twenty one years old. That is a 9 year difference. That is child abuse. I look back on it now and I am so lucky that nothing happened. I was so stupid!

Anyways during the summer before I started 8th grade I met a guy online. Honestly it's been so long that I can't remember if we met through a mutual friend or if we met in a chat room. He was 3 years older than me and was going to the high school that my cousin went to and that I would eventually go to. We'll call him Ryan. Ryan and I talked on the phone all the time and we became pretty close. We went to the mall together once or twice and just had a normal "dating" relationship that you have in those awkward years before you really understand what dating really is.

Things were great for the first month or so before he started getting very...different. Small things I would do or say would make him mad. Eventually he wanted to have sex which I turned down. Obviously I was too young and I wasn't ready. He started running me down, telling me that I was worthless and that I couldn't get anyone better than him and blah blah blah. All of it was nonsense but when you have abuse issues to begin with and then you listen to horrible things over and over again you start to believe them eventually. I don't remember the exact date anymore {something about getting older and mommy brain has kicked my butt} but one night while my mom was at work and my brother was with his friends....I just decided to give up. I didn't want to live with myself and the things that Ryan had told me that I now believed. I wrote a crappy suicide letter and I used a kitchen butcher knife to cut my wrist. I didn't cut very deep because I had no idea what I was doing, but I realized something as I laid the blade against my other wrist. I didn't want to die, I just didn't know what else to do.

Oh my gosh I broke down and cried and cried and cried. What had I been thinking? How could I let some boy bring me down to such a level to where I couldn't even stand the thought of living one more day. How did I turn from such a happy (although slightly slutty) young lady to this sad, depressed, quiet girl that I had become?

And the sad thing is that this happens all the time! When I was in 8th grade (like 7 months after I cut my wrist) one of my classmates, Stephanie, killed herself. A little over a year later my mom's friend's daughter swallowed a whole big bottle of Advil. Even worse is that she regretted it, but told someone too late and she was gone.

During my high school years I became a cutter. I didn't cut all the time, but when things got bad at home or at school I cut myself. Sometimes I would use a knife, sometimes I would scratch myself over and over again with a paper clip until I made myself bleed. It was a horrible way to release some of the pain I felt inside. It was like I had to physically feel the pain that I couldn't express.

Ethan is what saved me during those days. He would see me with a jacket on during the summer or sometimes I wouldn't even bother to hide the marks on my wrists, and he would get so upset. He'd beg me not to hurt myself, to just call him whenever I felt like doing it just so that he could distract me and make me smile again. He was my guardian angel.

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I have to stop myself here because I am trying to put my other ordeal into words and instead I'm just sitting in the living room crying my eyes out at 12:17 in the morning. Ethan has school in the morning and Aiden will be waking up early since he went to bed early. Plus I have a date with fellow blogger Jennifer at  The Adventures of Team Roberts. She's going to show me around the new base and all that good stuff so I'm pretty excited. {And I just accidentally deleted over half of the part 2 post I couldn't write because of the tears when I copied that link....awesome.}  Yeap it's definitely time for bed!

Goodnight everyone and please keep Jessica and anyone else you know of that is coping with depression in your prayers.