a conflict of needs.

disclaimer: this post deals with issues of depression, suicidal ideation, and mental illness. please read (or don't) with care for yourself above all other priorities.

i was thirteen when i first admitted that i wanted to die.

it was so much deeper than want, and when it hit me, i couldn't remember what it felt like to want to live. it was insidious in its invasion of my body, this sudden drive to dive from the roof of my middle school. i remember telling my best friends that i wanted to cling to metal in a lightning storm, hoping it'd strike and i'd fade like the stars at dawn. 

that year, i learned that "depression" was common in teens, and i finally had a word for the cloud that had followed me from college station to sembach to small town central georgia. depression. it seemed so small a name for the demons raging in my mind, too few syllables for the sadness that sent me to the corner of my room to scribble for hours in the dim light of my bedside lamp. i listened to melancholy mix tapes on my boom box, desperately alone and afraid to speak a word. in the two years since my eleventh birthday, i had gone from mary kate and ashley skirts to a rotation of black t-shirts and baggy jeans. i didn't know who i was in the mirror, but i knew i wanted that forever dark that came when your heart stopped beating. 

my depression made me feel even more transient than the constant moving did. that angry, degrading voice made me small, quiet, desperate not to draw attention. it made me scared and invisible, a ghost in the halls of my school. my classmates stared at me like i was a stranger, a monster who was once a friend. i felt like i was slipping through the planes of reality into some limbo where i could hear what they really thought of me, how annoying and worthless i was in their eyes. who would want a friend like me? who would want to know the way my mind drove me farther in, farther away? who would care if i disappeared?

but i finally told them. i couldn't hold the fear inside any longer. that fear was becoming purpose, it was transforming into a plan, and i was afraid i'd really do it, i'd really fly from the building and meet my asphalt grave. and how impermanent would i be then? some thirteen-year-old suicidal freak who penned some drivel in the margins of her math homework, too unoriginal to count to anyone who didn't know her. didn't know me.

even then, i needed to feel known. i needed to die, but i needed to matter.

a friend tried to talk me down over the phone. his stepdad picked up the line, listened in like the creep i later came to know he was. but, abusive prick or not, he probably saved my life when he hit redial, when he told my mam. 

if only it had ended there, in the air my mother and i shared above my bed. 

too bad the madness was just beginning.

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author's note: this post is the first in a series of indeterminate length about my history with depression and mental illness, and how it has contributed to my feelings of transience. this history and my woes of impermanence are inextricably connected, and i think exploring the relationship between the two might offer some insight to my current...unhappiness? discontent? [feeling that has no english word]?