- The Start
I should probably introduce myself. I am F. It’s not my full name but it’s what I decide to publish. You can call me F. I’m currently 15 years old and I want to live in Neverland. I don’t want to grow up and become an adult. I’m afraid people would want to much of me. Even more as they already do at this moment. As a teenager everyone wants to be an adult so they can drive, drink or do what they want. I do want to do what I want but that’ll ask for too many responsibilities and I’m afraid I can’t always fulfill those.
I’ve been depressed for 8 months now. I hear you asking, why am I depressed? (I didn’t hear you, I just assumed…) It’s along story that I had to explain to a couple of people like my best friend, my Tumblr best friends and my therapist. To publish this for everything to see is a big step for me but I think it’s a good step. It’s a good thing to talk to others about your problems, insecurities, or any other things that are bugging you.
I’ve always been insecure about myself. About my body, my talents, my everything. So when I get a positive comment I’m most likely to not believe it. When it’s a negative one, it’ll stay in my head for the rest of my life.
It started in August when a guy added me on Facebook. He started sending me messages but I wasn’t really freaking out or anything. It was just a creeper behind his computer. He started to say I was pretty and that he’d never seen a girl as beautiful as me. And I was so stupid, I believed him. I was happy when I got his messages saying that he liked my eyes in that picture and my hair in the other one. It made my day. He asked me if I wanted to send him pictures of my feet. I always knew I should never send pictures of myself to strangers but I had no problem about feet. They were just… feet. So I send them. A couple of days later he asked me other pictures. But not pictures of my feet or hands or anything, but pictures of myself. Without clothes. I immediately said no and told him to stay away and never message me again. But he didn’t stop. He kept begging and begging and every single time he got angrier and angrier. He started sending me messages about how ugly I was, how he lied everything just to get pictures, how I should kill myself cause I had no point on living anyway. The worst thing is that I started believing him. He called me ugly, I felt ugly, I was ugly. That was his logic and it became my logic. Every single day he sent me those messages and it hurt. It hurt so bad. I was scared that he would stand in front of my door, ready to shout all those things he said to me right into my face. I was scared that other people were thinking the same this whole time.
I saw no way out of hating myself and I knew I wouldn’t be happy ever again. I tried to find a way out of it. I took a pair of scissors and made five deep cuts in my wrist. It happened so fast and I couldn’t even feel pain at that moment. The pain only came a couple of seconds later when my heart started beating even faster because of the realization that I just cut my own wrist. I felt like I was going to faint because I was sweating and felt dizzy. My wrist couldn’t stop bleeding so I tried to clean it with disinfection. That was probably one of the most stupid things I’d ever done. It burned so hard! That’s when I started wearing lots of bracelets.
In this period of hating myself, I found the support of people on tumblr. They soon became one of my best friends. We talked about our problems and told eachother it was worth to keep on living and that we would make it through all of this pain. There was one girl that I talked everyday to. She was my tumblr best friend. She was the reason that I didn’t cut a lot of times. One day I tried to message her but she didn’t answer back. I thought she must’d been busy so I waited until the day after but she still hadn’t send anything back. I became worried to I sent her another text asking her if she was all right. Still no response. I waited until the next day and the day after that. Those three days became a week and that week became a month. Every day I sent her a message and yet, I got no reply. I was panicking and contacted one of her friends in real life if she was okay. She then told me she killed herself three weeks earlier. I couldn’t feel anything for a while. I was in shock and felt dumb. After two days it finally got to me she was actually gone. I was never going to talk to her again. The numb feeling replaced itself by sadness and crying for three hours straight. It was like all the water in my eyes had saved itself for that moment. She always helped me when I wanted to hurt myself and I helped her. And this time I couldn’t. That’s the worst feeling in the world. You see someone going from happy to really sad and you can’t do anything about it. You can only try to turn the hugs that you want to give into words but that’s not enough. That’s far from enough. Months and months I blamed myself for her death. But I realised that it was her choice. And how much I hated that choice, it was her decision.
I became a mess. I didn’t want to be social anymore. I rejected offers from friends for going to the cinema or for going to a party. I only focused on my school work cause that was the one thing that I could do well. Because off my depression I couldn’t focus anymore. My head was always thinking about something else and I couldn’t stop it. My graded got lower and lower and they said I had to go to another class or else I’ll have to re-do my year. I loved my previous class and I absolutely didn’t want to leave them. In January I changed class and I hated it. I hated every single second of it and didn’t see a point of going to school anymore. I tried to stay away from Gym because I didn’t want all of them to see my cuts. I’ve been in the same class for 4 months now and I must be honoust, It’s going quite well. My graded are way better now and I’m glad I still have my best friend by my side.
That’s how I got depressed. Those three reasons started it all for me. It changed my life completely.
- This is a teen-written article from our friends at L.A. Youth, a nonprofit organization
I’ve always wanted to do well in school but I have a hard time getting up and going. It started in elementary school. I’d think, “I’m tired.” I wanted to stay in my bed under my warm blankets. To get me to school, my mom would throw me over her shoulder or take a half hour to get me dressed because I was fighting her.
When I was in fourth grade, my older brother and sister were seeing a psychiatrist, so I came along to the appointments and sat in the waiting room. They had inherited anxiety disorder and depression from my mom. My parents would explain what was going on with me to the psychiatrist: “It’s always a battle getting her up in the morning. She’s not doing her assignments and she’s missing school.” The psychiatrist said, “It sounds like anxiety and depression. We can put her on medications and see if it works.” I didn’t understand what they were talking about. I didn’t know what depression and anxiety were. They told me, “It’ll help you,” so I took my meds but I didn’t know why.
But the medications didn’t always seem to work. I still wasn’t doing my assignments because I was lazy. After I missed an assignment, I didn’t want to go to school the next day. I was picturing my classes each period, seeing my teachers disappointed. You didn’t complete your homework again? After I missed one day it was a struggle to get out of bed the next day because I still had not completed my homework.
In middle school I’d miss one or two days a week and was late almost every day I did go. In the morning my mom would nag me, “I’m going to get in the shower and I want you dressed by the time I get out.” I’d think, “I’m tired, let me go back to sleep. I don’t want to go to school. I don’t want to face my teachers. I should have done my homework.” But I’ve always had a hard time expressing my feelings so I wasn’t communicating what was going on inside me. When my mom came back and I wasn’t dressed she’d yell at me, “You need to get dressed and get going.” I wouldn’t say anything back so eventually she left me at home because she had to get to work.
Missing school hurt my grades. My parents would tell the school that I was depressed so my absences were excused. But after a while my parents stopped giving my school a reason because I was staying home so much, so I got detention for missing school. I failed English and got C's and D's in my other classes. Every year I went to summer school to get my credits. I knew that if I missed too much summer school I’d get dropped. I needed my credits, so I used that as motivation to go.I told myself at the beginning of ninth grade that I would change. I was going to go to school every day, do my work and get good grades, like a normal student. But it was a lot harder than I thought.
My best friends were going to a different school than I was. On the third day it hit me that my friends weren’t there. I didn’t feel like I had much in common with the people I had lunch with. I started missing three, four days of school a week. I didn’t go at all in November and December. Because I had been diagnosed with depression, the school had a tutor come to my house to give me my work.
Being alone every day got boring so at the end of the semester, I wanted to go back to school for second semester. But I didn’t know the people I had lunch with that well and I still had to take my finals. It was overwhelming all over again. I knew I had to have good grades and attendance to get a permit to go to the other high school with my friends. I tried to go to school every day but I couldn’t.
It seemed like nothing I did was going to be good enough so I gave up and stopped going again and stopped taking my meds because it didn’t seem like they were working.
I stopped caring about everything. I distracted myself by reading and watching TV. I even stopped showering. I could smell myself and my hair was greasy. After a while I noticed dark patches on my skin. I rubbed it and the dead skin came off. I realized the dark patches were dirt. Eww. I washed my arms in the sink or in the pool. Looking back, it grosses me out that I didn’t shower but I can understand because I was depressed and I didn’t feel like doing anything.
One time that May I was sitting on the couch and I started thinking about how I wasn’t in school. I started crying. I thought about my friends, how they were probably having a good time. I thought about how my life was going down the tubes and I wasn’t doing anything about it. My life sucks. Why am I even alive? What if I died? Would the world be better without me? No, my friends and family would be sad, I thought. I didn’t want to think about that stuff so I started to read.
My dad was constantly nagging me, “They’re going to put you in a group home if you don’t go to school.” He said that in a group home, I would have to go to school every day or there would be consequences. I didn’t believe him. In eighth grade they had threatened to put me in a mental hospital and that didn’t happen. If that didn’t happen, why would this?
- Getting Reacquainted With Myself (Tumblr user)
As of this pass week going through massive depression, crying fits, starving myself, and isolating myself from myself and my family. I really need to evaluate my life and get reacquainted with myself because I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know what makes me happy, or sad. I don’t know what I am, or even what I need to do. Until I’m able to answer these questions I can never truly be happy by myself or have a meaningful happy relationship with my family, friends, or a significant other. So time to build a schedule and create a 40 day challenge to write and reflect and reknow myself. So I can love and see and be the the full potential women that’s inside of me and what people tell me they can see in me.
- M.P.'s Story
The lesson I learned for this year: Guidance can help you a lot more than you think.
About seven months ago, I started feeling bad for reasons I couldn't explain. Everything started bothering me more that usual; a lot of times, my thoughts were so paralyzing that I couldn't think about or do anything else.
My family life has always been sort of bad because we all don't get along, so I've always avoided my parents. They're always yelling for no reason. They've always made me feel like crap so I never talk to them. Unfortunately, the fact that you have no help from anyone but your friends is a big problem when you're having a nervous breakdown.
Between having to play for two soccer teams, the effects of September 11th constantly bothering me in the back of my mind (along with all this other fear of things), my parents not allowing us to express anger, and getting made fun of a lot for being weird was driving me crazy. I wanted to die.
So I started slitting my wrists. Eventually, one of my friends thought it would be interesting to see how my teacher would react so she told her. My teacher told the guidance counselor. At the time, I didn't know what was wrong with me. But all the guidance counselor did was ask me what I thought was wrong...I guess I didn't really want the help because I didn't think anything was wrong with me, and I didn't believe that guidance counselors could help anyway. So I stopped going, but the pain inside kept growing.
Soon, I couldn't handle much more. I quit the basketball team and stopped doing my homework. I spent endless nights locked in my room just thinking about everything. I didn't sleep, and the cuts were getting deeper. I slept during classes sometimes and my grades went from straight A's to really low. I even talked to myself and got dizzy sometimes. But my parents never took the hint.
I saw an "In the Mix" episode of your show about ecstasy so decided to go to your site to find out more about it. I ended up finding the part about depression and realized I had all the symptoms. My sadness got to the point where I couldn't even focus on my friends anymore. My fears were scaring me more than usual and one night, I pictured my own death and even wrote up a will.
The day after, when I realized I was still alive, I went to guidance and waited for her to come back from what she was doing and I told her everything. I felt a little better after we talked about everything. She promised not to tell my parents, if I kept coming back and promised not to slit myself again. Now, I'm starting to change my perception on things and trying to not go nuts over things I can't control, like when I'll die. She told me that I have to decide which roads I take in life, and that hurting myself doesn't change anything. I should stop thinking about the outcomes of everything so much and just do what I think is right.
As much as I've hated the 8th grade, I think I've learned more this year, than I have during my entire life. Guidance Counselors can help a lot, but only if you want the help. And thanks to a few good teachers, many supportive friends, and a guidance counselor that I had no faith in, I might some day feel like myself again.
I also wrote a poem:
Take a razor
Slit your wrist,
Scream
Until there's no sound left,
Beat the crap
out of yourself
while no one cares,
Until you finally
Dig to the bottom
Of your being.
Go as far
as you can go,
On the road of self-discovery,
Even if it results
in death
- D.'s Story
About two hours later, at about 11:00, I went to sleep. At 12:40, I woke up and got really scared, really scared that I was going to die. I went into the bathroom and tried to throw the Tylenol up, but all that came up was blood. I tried to run to my parents' room, but at this point, I could barely move. I was scared and the Tylenol was taking its toll. So I turned on all the lights and started screaming/crying that I took all that medicine. My dad rushed me to the hospital...
I remember the time being 12:47 in the car. We went to the emergency room and the doctors took my blood. After what seemed like hours and hours and hours, they told me that my Tylenol level was 154 and it was a good thing my dad took me to the hospital when he did. I had to drink all this stuff, called MucaMyst...but the most common name for it is Charcoal. I kept throwing up all night. Soon, they took me to the intensive care unit. I had about 7 things hooked up to me...they wouldn't let me be by myself, they thought I was going to do something again. I had to stay in the intensive care unit until my Tylenol level reached 10, which is the norm of what it's supposed to be.
Every four hours I had to drink that Charcoal stuff. It was probably the most disgusting thing I have ever had in my life! Anyway, so then I went to the Pediatric floor. My mom had to stay with me the whole time. They wouldn't let me close the blinds. They had to watch my every move. I would go to the bathroom and they kept asking me what I was doing. In the hospital, on my floor, there were a lot of sick kids. I mean, really sick...and I was there because I tried to kill myself. I took a room from someone who could have been dying, all because I did something stupid.
Finally, on Wednesday afternoon, they let me go home. But it wasn't the same. I tore my whole family apart! I'm not even allowed to stay home by myself anymore. I'm not trusted to be by myself. My parents made me move my mattress into their room because they're afraid I'll do something. My sister wouldn't talk to me for like a week after. Things are so terrible now. Not a minute goes by without me thinking about killing myself again, or thinking about what happened...but every time I think that, I think of how much I would hurt the ones who love me. I don't think I REALLY want to die, as much as I think that I do. It's just that I couldn't think of any other way to cope with my problems. I WANT to be better. I hate being miserable. It's so hard for me to laugh and put on an act. I want to be happy without an act. So I'll get the help I need in order to get to that place.