Me Before You Would Have Killed Me
Iâll make you all a deal. This will be one of the last posts that I make on the matter. But you all need to signal boost this. This one needs to be heard by everyone.Â
Iâm at a really good place in my life right now. I just turned 22. I just finished my fourth year of college with a 3.7 GPA, I moved into my first apartment, Iâm doing an awesome internship, Iâm doing a ton of advocacy work. Iâm genuinely happy.
Iâm at a really great place.
Iâve been disabled all my life but about ten years ago, I walked into an operating room and came out in a wheelchair. (Well, technically I came out on a stretcher, but you get the point.)
And it took me a while to realize that my life was completely different. In fact, it wasnât until about three years later, when I was about fifteen, that I really realized it. I donât know if I was in shock all that time, if I was numb, if the medications that I was on limited any conscious thought, let alone emotion. But it was around the age of fifteen that everything came crashing down and I fell apart. I became extremely depressed. And let me tell you, no matter how hard you try, you never forget that feeling. Itâs one of the worst feelings in the world. Depression is like being in a room where everything is pitch black. And people are screaming at you to turn on the light switch, but you canât find it, you canât see it, even though everyone else seems to know exactly where it is, youâre completely lost in this dark room with no way out. Depression is horrible. I would never wish it on my worst enemy. Even now, there are days when I struggle, though those days are nowhere as bad as the weeks, months, that I battled depression as a teenager. As a fifteen-year-old, too weak to put up a fight.
Now, I should mention that I never tried anything.
But believe me when I say that I know what itâs like to want to.
And believe me when I say that if you built a time machine, if you took Jojo Moyesâ infamous book, if you sent it back to 2009, and if fifteen-year-old me had read itâŚ
I probably wouldnât be here right now.
I would have lost my battle.
Because I would have picked up a book wherein the main character kills themselves because they think that their life isnât worth living now that theyâre disabled.
And I would have related all too well, and I would have done something thatâs genuinely terrifying to think about. I know I would have. I was not in a good place at that time, I was not strong, and while I did survive, it wouldnât have taken much for the scales to tip in the other direction.
And I keep going into the Me Before You tags on different websites and I keep seeing teenagers who are in the same place that I once was, who are saying that they were sobbing in the movie theaters because they didnât expect the ending and they genuinely donât know what to do.
I would have been one of those teenagers.
And I know that the author probably didnât mean for any of this to happen, she didnât expect the huge backlash from the disabled community, she didnât expect a very tired college student to be revealing something very personal at 1:06 AM.
She just wanted to tell a story.
I read an interview a few days ago where she talked about how she had seen a few debates over assisted suicide and she felt compelled to write a story, to give a perspective, to give a voice.
And whether she meant to or not, that voice is a single mantra:
âItâs okay to die.â
And I keep seeing people defend the book, defend the author, defend that voice, by saying that itâs just one perspective, itâs just one voice.
And itâs not just one voice.
You see, we didnât need Jojo Moyes to be that voice. She thinks we did. But we didnât.
We hear that voice every single day.
We hear that voice every single day.
We hear people talking about how itâs okay for the disabled to die.
(Note: I was actually going to make this a video but at this point, I started crying and couldnât finish, so Iâm typing it all out instead.)
And we hear our own inner voice, whispering to us at night, urging us that itâs okay to die.
We hear the voices. We hear them. We hear them every single day. The voices that say that itâs okay to die.
I heard them when I was fifteen. I heard them loud and clear. And I believed them. And had I read Me Before You, it would have been the voice to break the camelâs back. It would have been the voice that I listened to.
This book would have killed me.
This book is going to end up killing someone else.
And I donât think Jojo Moyes understands, I donât think that the abled community understands, I think they have the privilege of not understanding just how loud that voice can be and how damaging that voice can be. They donât hear those voices every day.
Whether we want to or not.
For the amount of people who say, âItâs okay to die.â there are very few people out there who say, âItâs okay to live.â
Theyâre the voices that we need to hear. Theyâre the voices that are so few and far between.
And Iâm here tonight to try to be one of those voices.
For those of you who are constantly hearing the various voices that are telling you that itâs okay to die, please, please know that those voices are lying to you. I know that itâs hard. I know what itâs like to be in that dark room. I also know what itâs like to open the door and to escape.
And I know there are others that have escaped as well. And now, we have to help the others who havenât. We have to help the others who keep hearing these voices. We have to put an end to them.
