Astra Montague

TW: mentions of suicide and just in general mental health

One of the hardest things to think about is how young I was when I broke. It only really set in when I looked at my brother and realized that he’s 13, the same age I was, and I can’t imagine him going through that. I’ve always had a weird concept of time when it comes to my mental health issues, in my mind when I think back to how I looked/acted when I attempted I don’t picture myself as how I actually looked. I was freshly 13 and had been struggling with hallucinations, depression, and constant paranoia for almost a year. To think about my baby brother hurting that much makes me feel sick, but one of the worst parts is that I’m the same age my sister was. At 15 years old my sister had to visit her baby sister in the psych ward, she had to hear her parents tell her that her sister had tried to kill myself. My brother was 11 years old talking to his older sister on speakerphone from the hospital. I had never really told my siblings how bad it had gotten, I hadn’t really ever told anyone, I wish I had. I think I’ll always feel a bit of guilt towards what I had to make my family go through. The people around me had to watch me struggle for years, they had to watch me live miserably, and I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself for that. It’s been almost three years, I’m two years clean, but there will always be a part of that scared, lonely 13 year old girl inside me. I will probably always be unable to touch/use anything in a brown bottle, and I’ll probably never be able to live a normal life without the help of SSRIs. A part of me is glad that it happened, because if not I probably would’ve gotten a lot worse and never have gotten help. Sometimes you need to break because it’s more manageable to put back together pieces than to seal a bunch of small cracks. Sometimes acknowledging that something affected you means also acknowledging that you’ll never be who you were before it. Obviously I don’t want to go back to how I was when I was 12, but I do miss being able to live in ignorance, because it’s a lot harder to ignore your problems when you know what the consequences of that are. I will always have to live with the fact that I am not normal, my brain chemistry is messed up and can never be fixed. The hardest part of knowing that you’re mentally ill is knowing that it’s forever, it won’t go away, I will always feel like this to some degree. I depend on medications to keep me alive, and as thankful as I am to be here, I wish I could live the life that 11 year old me deserves. A life where I’m doing amazing in school, I’m able to hang out in large groups of people, go to parties, a life where I’m able to feel loved and wanted. She deserved so much more, she didn’t deserve this life, and I know she would be disappointed that I don’t have the busy high school social life that I used to see on the TV shows I watched 24/7. I also know that 13 year old me would just be happy to know that she’s alive, because she couldn’t even see making it to 14. I miss who I used to be, but she’ll always have a special place in my heart.