Content Warning: Suicidal Tendencies/Ideation, Anxiety, Depression
Dear Reader,
I don’t know if it’s because of school, family relationships, or just the state of society, but I feel tired and disconnected from the world around me. It is a tiredness that cannot be solved with sleep. When I sit down in a chair or lie down in my bed, there is this inertia. I don’t want to get up ever again. I don’t have any thoughts left at all—not even my normal anxieties and the overthinking that hits at night. I’m just left with this horrible spinning emptiness and indifference to everything that happens to me. I could sit there for eternity, for so long, until all of my limbs rotted and fell off, and I wouldn’t care.
I’m not suicidal, though, and I feel like I don’t even have the right to be, as strange and awful as that sounds. I have decent grades, my parents aren’t overly strict or controlling, and my friends are good to me. It feels like people I hear about on the news who have self-harmed have gone through some sort of horrible trauma or mistreatment. And if people have gone through things a million times worse than me and survived, then it almost feels disrespectful to those lost from the world to give up so early and waste all the privileges I have been born with.
Yet, sometimes I find myself romanticizing parking by the highway at night, walking alongside the roar of the road, two feet away from death. Maybe to feel a thrill, something that would convince me that I am still alive.
I have heard that opening up to people about your feelings and simply letting yourself express your emotions helps you heal. And it probably does.
But how do I begin sharing these thoughts with the world? I even struggle with finding the right words for them in my own head. My family believes my inertia is due to laziness, and in front of my friends, my automatic response is always to put on a mask in fear of ruining the mood. There have been a few times where people have asked if I am okay. I could have responded No. I could have said, Actually, I’m not okay. I feel really awful, I just don’t know how to define why and how right now. But always, my tongue twists the wrong way and I blurt out, “Yeah, just tired.” Afterward, I always feel bad because I end up believing my sadness is completely self-inflicted; I can’t even blame my feelings alone on anyone else when they’ve asked about me, after all. I wish there was a way to convey in my face the difference between the tired I feel and the tired from not getting enough sleep.
I hope that if I begin to listen more closely to myself, just like I am while writing this, I can one day find a way to verbalize these words to those around me.
