This is pure stream of consciousness - spilled, unfiltered. I won't proofread. I just want to witness myself as I am.
Last year, on October 6th, 2024, I stood face-to-face with death. And somehow came back. Stumbled back. Dragged back.
I've been living with chronic suicidality for two and a half years, maybe more. Five serious attempts. Though other times count if intention is what matters. Sometimes the body just forgets to cooperate with despair.
Diagnosed: BPD, Bipolar, OCPD traits. I hesitate to even name this. Feels decadent to have names for pain, to have access to professionals, medication, therapy. There's something obscene about privilege even here. A whole architecture holding me together, and yet I want to walk out of it.
How many people live with this same exhaustion but without insurance? Without a family that can pay for psychiatrists? Without friends who will drop everything at 3 AM? The guilt of having resources while still wanting to die - its own kind of violence.
October 2022. University became unbearable. I'm still there, by the way. The institution hasn't released me yet, nor have I released it. Law school is hell. Designed to break you down systematically. Competition disguised as education. Performative intellectualism that leaves no room for actual human complexity. But that's another story.
I went to the university therapist. Tried to help myself. None of it stuck. Self-harm took root like weeds in neglected soil. Days bled into each other until I couldn't do it anymore. Saw a psychiatrist. That changed things. Suddenly, my madness had a prescription. Official - like getting a certificate for something I'd been doing unprofessionally for years.
Therapists swapped in and out. Doctors too. My pain shapeshifted while I remained constant - still harming myself, even now as I write this. There's something meditative about the ritual. The precision required. The brief moment of clarity that follows. People think self-harm is about attention. But mostly it's about feeling something definite. In a world that refuses to make sense.
Every day got harder. Academic pressure. College climate. Relationships. Everything compounded. A system demanding you perform wellness while slowly killing you from the inside.
I never hid my scars. They felt integral to me. Marks that insisted: see me as I am. My left thigh is a mess of scars. Multiplying day by day. I only cut on my left side - like archiving the journey. Where I started. Where I am. Tattoos exist only on my right. As if splitting myself in two.
Three now: a sutured scar, a fractal head-within-a-head my roommate named, a chaotic void. No compelling reason to mention them except they're here. Part of the narrative mess. The tattoos hurt differently than cuts - intentional pain with aesthetic purpose. Sanctioned suffering. Always thought so.
Exhaustion led to the first major attempt: a vein sliced at my ankle. Blood everywhere. Darker than I expected. Pooling on the hostel room floor like spilled paint. My roommate was at a friend's. Got to know. Called up people. Rescued me. "Rescued." That word sits wrong every time.
The next was an overdose. Around ninety-eight psychiatric pills. Counted out like a prayer. I told a friend - I felt almost euphoric. Says something about me, doesn't it? My attempts are mostly when I'm hypomanic. Not depressed. Something about an elevated mood makes death feel like an adventure rather than an escape. Future thesis there.
Friends intervened. Hospital. Antidotes. Endless explanations to nurses. I remember recounting every pill. Each one is a tally mark. Watching their faces change as they realized the mathematics of my desperation.
Hospital stays blend together - white walls, beeping machines. People are asking how I feel on a scale of one to ten. As if pain could be quantified so neatly. Psychiatric wards are strange places. Everyone pretends normalcy while being observed for breakdown signs.
There was asphyxiation, too. Something about relationships. I don't want to write it out. Love makes us capable of terrible things. Including terrible things to ourselves. My body betrayed me with its reflex to survive. Gasping back to consciousness against my will. That word again. "Saved."
On this very day last year, I tried again. The urge came from nowhere. Or everywhere. I was just so emptied. Realized I'd run out of reasons to keep going. Got alcohol. Made pharmacy rounds like methodical shopping. Stocked up the way people buy groceries for storms. Each pharmacist's face blurred into the next. They never ask questions when you have prescriptions.
I got drunk and then I swallowed the pills. Dialing into oblivion. One of my lovers - polyamory is another long story, love multiplied but never divided cleanly - heard something off. Called my then-partner. In minutes, university machinery creaked into motion. Some twenty people converged. Hospital again. This time with a rare antidote. I spent two days on a ventilator before my lungs remembered how to work.
A year later. I am still here. Suicidal, still. Surviving isn't the same as living. I've tried again since - nothing worth cataloguing. Still tired. Still barely able to cross the hours. The world keeps insisting I should be grateful to be alive. But gratitude feels like another performance I'm too exhausted to give.
I say this without embellishment: I mean to die. And yet the rituals of planning keep me alive. Sometimes I think it's the thought of escaping that lets me endure. My blueprint for leaving becomes the scaffolding that holds me here for another day. Death as a future possibility makes the present bearable. Strange mathematics of survival. The exit strategy becomes the reason to stay. Just a little longer. Just until I figure out which pills work best. Just until I find the right moment. Just until. Just until.