by march of 2025, it was official. i had been dangerously suicidal for an entire 3 straight years. no hotline was going to help me. i had no money for inpatient care or therapy. i spent most of my days so numb it was terrifying, became a void of a person. suicide was no longer a choice so much as an inevitability to me: it all made a terrible, dark kind of sense. it was as if i was writing a very long equation and kept arriving at the exact same answer. it was a twisted but peaceful kind of self-forgiveness - my dog would be happier with my brother, my family would have less to worry about.
i had tried everything. everything on earth i could think of to try. distractions and burnout and medication and all of it. i integrated with my community and practiced my hobbies and tried to make smart choices and exercised regularly and kept putting it off until tomorrow. i would wake up and think - what if i am just like this, forever? three years into the worst depressive spiral of your adult life, the sensation of it becomes almost smooth, like a worrystone. nothing matters. it is almost a bone that never healed correctly. i was never quite mentally healthy, this was just the crystallization process.
i genuinely thought i was never going to recover, ever. that it would just be an eon of that experience, forever and ever.
my happiness did not come back like a bolt of light. i saw one very-small flicker and i snatched that moth out of the sky with my teeth, held her pinned against me. i worked so hard it felt stupid; i faltered; i continued.
on saturday, i had the best day of my life. it didn't start out that way. it just unrolled into one beautiful moment after another, even though i expected nothing from it. i spent the entire ride home grinning so widely that my cheeks hurt. i watched the sunset in silence. all i could think was holy fuck i'm glad i didn't kill myself.
in the bad place, i couldn't see the happiness coming for me. it wasn't like i wasn't aware good things could theoretically happen (and did sometimes happen even to me), it was that i just genuinely believed joy was no longer a possibility. i had tried to fix joy against my ceiling, after all, and it had bled down and spoiled in the air above me. i assumed that i had simply run out of the opportunity - that if i did experience joy, it would be difficult to parse, muted. a mumble instead of a shout.
the shout i am feeling is still echoing inside of me. i am joyful when i touch moss and i am joyful when i stand in the sun and i am joyful when i make my dinner. i am joyful when i text my friends and when i skinny dip and when i sing off-key to my girlfriend. i am joyful and i dance in the rain like a stupid lesbian manic pixie dream girl and i build little forts for mice to hide in and i hug trees without warning and i am joyful about the cringe of it all, about the silly abandon i feel.
i have bad days, but the good outshines them. i cannot fathom that. last year at this time, the bad days were still outnumbering the good by a margin so wide it was the difference between a pond and the ocean.
but the good days were there, which was new. and if they were there, it meant they could exist, and i could multiply them, and i could get out and get through. if the good days were there, laid out in white stars along the black beach of my life - i could pick them up gently and carry them, one at a time. each new one so blisteringly precious.
i can't tell you when i became overwhelmed with happiness. i think it snuck up on me, a blade in the night. i just woke up one day, and i was so intimately, wildly glad for it. for the gift of my one and only life.
