Please, stay alive.

⚠️ Mental Health Trigger Warning ⚠️ 

I’m going to share some very hard things about mental and emotional health here, so if this is an area you are seriously struggling in, you may want to avoid this post. 

Get help. If you need help finding help, please reach out and I will try to find someone for you. 

—

I’ve grappled with severe anxiety and depression since childhood. I was misdiagnosed with asthma as a child because as I later learned as an adult, I was actually having panic attacks with serious physical implications. We’re talking 7 years old. 

Sometimes this stems from trauma. Some of it can be hereditary. It can be environmental or situational or seasonal or due to extreme hormonal changes like pregnancy. It can be triggered by things like a global pandemic that forces extroverts inside for months with no social interaction. It can come in waves unexpectedly and the minutes can feel like years. It can be caused by the tiniest chemical imbalance in your brain and sometimes the answer is so simple and it just takes the exact right combination of circumstances and medication and timing to remedy it. 

The point is: there is no right or wrong when it comes to mental health and it can look so drastically different from one individual to the next and even one day to the next because the human brain is incredibly complex. 

All that said: I want to share some very hard truths about my personal story in hopes that it lands on someone reading who is in the same place I was once in and encourages them to keep trying. 

I wanted to die for a very long time. We’re talking the better part of a decade. It wasn’t even really for a lack of wanting to live so much as it was that I felt like I was doing the world a disservice by being here. 

No amount of love or support or any of the best words could have convinced me of what I now know to be true because in my heart of hearts I KNEW that the world, most importantly, my husband and my children and all those close to me who I burdened daily with my existence would be better off without me here. 

It’s not like this for everyone experiencing suicidal thoughts, so please don’t take this as the Bible by any means. This is what it was like for me as an individual. 

I honestly can’t even explain why I never went through with it, but it was like in spite of the place I’d lived in for so long, I somehow had this undying HOPE that things would get better some day. That I would somehow start to believe the things that people said. That I would one day be able to grow in to the type of person who proved to be worthy of the love I craved. Who made the kind of positive impact I believed I needed to make in order to deserve my place here; the kind of impact I desperately wanted to make, but couldn’t muster the energy because I was so buried in my depression. 

All I ever wanted was to help others, but I couldn’t see my value and I truly truly believed that the world would be much better off without me in it. 

What I didn’t realize then is that I was already enough. That I was already making that impact. That I was a light in the lives of so many others without realizing it. That, in spite of my daily “failures”, my husband and children were so incredibly loved and cared for. That I was raising wonderful humans and that YES, I WAS a huge part of that and NO, they would not be better off without me. 

All that to say, there was nothing you could have said to me to convince me otherwise at the time. Ask the people closest to me. They will tell you (I am giving you permission) that they tried and that I was a brick wall. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t trying to be stubborn. I just knew something they didn’t know and they couldn’t possibly understand. 

I was wrong. 

You are wrong. 

I know you won’t believe me right now. 

But you are wrong. 

You are so worth loving. 

You are deserving of the future you desire. 

Please hold on. 

Please stay. 

Please seek alternatives to your current truth. They are out there and the process of finding them can feel daunting and hopeless, but I promise you, the combination is out there and sometimes it takes time that you feel like you don’t have, but you do. 

You can make it to the other side of this seemingly endless, treacherous path. Because I did. And I can’t promise that I’ll never go back there, but what I can promise is that I’m going to do whatever it takes to avoid that place for the rest of my life here and I’m challenging you today to do that same because it’s really beautiful over here.

Stay with me. 

Do whatever it takes. 

Come join me over here.