I Choose Life

It's 3 am and I want to kill myself.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to die - only at 25 did I start actively wanting to commit suicide. At 3 am on the day of my 25th birthday, I learned that there is a difference between wishing to die and planning to die. I learned as a child that self-murder is a sin. But when life is so incredibly hard there comes a time at which the hell of hell and the hell of the world seem one and the same.

Of course, I'm not particularly religious. I'm not sure you'd even call me Christian anymore, but when the notorious Black Dog of depression bites in the darkness, I reckon most people would start to contemplate the God they were raised with. He never helps, though.

My dear friend Fluoxetine helps - along with CBT, talking therapy, intermittent self-harm, and a bloody-nosed pride that classes suicide as an unforgivable weakness. That sounds cruel, but it's only the truth. That callous belief is a part of the real me, along with buckets of empathy, a bad singing voice, no rhythm, and a sharp mind for research.

So it's 3 am, I'm 26, and I want to kill myself. Because mental illness, the chemical cause of mental illness, doesn't go away. Depression caused by a breakup or a bereavement might go away in time, but when your brains wired wacky its a lifelong companion. Friends and lovers alike have learned the hard way that it cannot be fixed. No matter how happy I am, how easy life gets, how much love is poured onto me I will not be 'normal'.My guidance counselor knew this, he gave me a copy of Matthew Johnstone's I Had a Black Dog - it helped me to understand one thing.

The 'Black Dog' is my responsibility. I have to feed it, but not too much. I have to love it and nurture it when no-one else can. I have to make sure that it doesn't bite anyone else. You cannot starve the Black Dog, it'll only turn on you in desperation - because more people are like me than they know. For many people its a part of them, and it'll live as long as they do.

S0, it's 3 am and I want to kill myself. I'm 27 and nothing has changed. I've been at home for 3 years, the longest relationship of my life ended at 24, I'm broke, I seesaw in and out of debt, I yo-yo in and out of depression. I slip and slide from piling on weight to losing it at frightening rates.

It's getting weary, this difference between wanting to die and wanting to kill myself is a boring distinction now. Even the doctors are bored. My mind keeps trying to kill me, but I refuse to die. I hang on, tenacious, stalwart in the belief that something will actually change. The Black Dog and I are not friends, but we rub along together nicely.

Instead of it mauling me, I maul other people. I am ornery, sharp, caustic, and viciously unfair to those who try my limited patience. People think I'm an arsehole because the #BeKind movement didn't tell them that mental illness is not a cuddly problem. For every moment that people spend wounded, weeping, and vulnerable, there are hundreds where trying to provide comfort is like gathering up shards of broken glass with your bare hands.

So, it's 3 am, I'm 28 and I want to kill myself. I lie awake every night, terrified that my grandmother will die before I move out again and I hate myself for the fact that it's an 80/20 split between not wanting her to die worried about my ability to live and my own worry as to how I will survive without her. She's all I know - the only person who has actually provided a form of parental support.

I've stopped hurting others - just as I learned to soothe the Black Dog to keep it calm, I have learned to smooth my own jagged edges and stay as serene as possible. More often than not I succeed. My father disowned me for his own reasons, and I was lucky that they were ridiculous enough for me to understand they were his reasons right away. There's probably a shard of my own fault in there, hidden under the delusions of witchcraft (I shit you not), because I repaid his shoddy parenthood by becoming an uninterested and contemptful child. Maybe we'll smooth it out - maybe we won't.

I have no need of him, but it'd a be a lie to say I didn't wish things were different.

There's no stunning revelation here. Mental illness runs in my family like a virus - my mum, dad, and I are all a little sharp and brittle. There's no triumph where I breakthrough and the happy ending appears - this is where I am now. Right now. I tookthe reins and started to grapple with my mental illness that first night, when I learned by the difference between wanting to die and planning to commit suicide.

I'm persistent and hopeful. I'm stubborn to a fault. I want to love. I want to live well. I do my best. That's who I am, for what it's worth. The main difference is that I'm not relatively certain I'm not going to die (or kill myself), at least not in the foreseeable future. I can learn to live like this until I change my circumstances.

It's enough.