Maybe I was wrong.
On what would be my boyfriend’s last Saturday alive I remember having a conversation with him in the car about how I wished people who took their own lives had just held on for a little while longer cos things always have a way of working themselves out. He said I was projecting because I had survived my bad times, not everyone could. I said he was right. Then he took his life that following Monday.
I find myself back in that space I was in in 2016 and I’m wondering to myself if maybe I was wrong all along. Maybe I foolishly believed that we all could just survive things because nothing this tragic had ever happened to me. Maybe I thought people just weren’t trying hard enough when they had given their all and life was just shit.
I think I focused too much on people going through unimaginable pain and not the unimaginable pain itself. Maybe there really is pain that we just cannot get over no matter how hard we try. My boyfriend lost his parents tragically when he was 14. 15yrs later he took his life cos of that. He just never got over it.
He was seeing a therapist and I thought he was finally starting to heal. Boy was I wrong. I’m so confused by a lot of things right now and doubting my own judgment of a lot of things. People can’t just be taking their lives cos they have nothing better to do.
I feel humbled in my realization. I was arrogant in my survival of major depression. I wore it like a badge of honor. Like it somehow made me a better person with strength and willpower to be admired by everyone. Life wasn’t fooled.
I wish I could go back to that last Saturday in the car with my boyfriend and tell him that I get why people take their own lives and it’s okay. I hope he knows I have never judged him for his decision. Life is incredibly hard and sometimes we feel like no one would understand so the best solution is to just take ourselves out. I get it now.
How humbling it is to realize that really, I could have been wrong all along. I’m going to sit in this space and let life teach me things I was too arrogant to learn.
There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by band-aids or poetry…- Sarah Kay
