goodjunkies
Member
- Mar 7, 2024
- 20
Hi everyone.
It has been about two years since I was actively using this website, and I have thought for a while about coming back here to write something. I think, more than anything, I want to leave behind something that I desperately needed to hear when I was spending so much of my time here: that a life can change so gradually that you do not even realize you are surviving your way into something better.
For most of my life, I struggled incessantly with thoughts of suicide and with this suffocating conviction that nothing was ever really going to change. There were periods where hopelessness stopped feeling temporary and instead became something almost inseparable from the way I understood myself and the world around me. I could not imagine becoming someone who would one day look back on that period of my life from a distance.
But I can now.
I have given it time, enough time that I feel comfortable saying this without being afraid that I am speaking too soon: I am in a much better place in my life now. That does not mean I don't often feel down. It would be dishonest to say that I do not still have days where I retreat into myself, become overwhelmed by my own thoughts, or feel some trace of that old heaviness returning. The difference is that those feelings no longer seem infinite to me. They no longer convince me that they are all there will ever be. My life has become populated by too many reminders that there are things worth staying for, people worth loving, experiences I could never have anticipated, and entire versions of myself that I would never have met if I had decided my story was already finished.
I wish I could tell you there was one thing that changed everything for me. There wasn't.
There was no singular revelation, no perfect medication, relationship, conversation, or morning where I woke up and suddenly wanted to be alive. The change happened in fragments. Some were so small that I probably did not recognize them as change at all when they were happening. But beneath all of it, I think there was one stubborn and incredibly important thing that remained: some part of me still wanted to get better. Even when that desire was faint, even when it existed beside the part of me that wanted everything to stop, it was there.
And I think that matters more than I understood at the time.
Suffering can become strangely familiar. When you have lived inside of it for long enough, even misery can begin to feel safer than the uncertainty of becoming someone else. Change is frightening precisely because it asks you to imagine a life you have no evidence for yet. When you are deeply depressed, possibility itself can feel almost insulting because you cannot see what everyone else insists must be waiting for you.
I understand that feeling.
But there are things beyond the horizon of what you can presently imagine. There are people whose names you do not know yet who may someday become impossibly important to you. There are places you have never stood, conversations you have never had, songs you have not heard at exactly the right moment, versions of yourself you have not grown into, and ordinary days that will mean nothing to anyone else but will quietly become evidence that staying was worth it. None of those things can prove themselves to you in advance. That is perhaps the cruelest part. Sometimes you have to remain here without having any certainty about what remaining here will eventually give you.
Hearing about younger people finding this website has affected me especially deeply. I know what it means to reach a point where spaces like this feel like one of the only places where the severity of what you are feeling can be spoken about without being immediately misunderstood or reduced to a cliché. I have always understood why conversations about unbearable suffering become intertwined with questions of autonomy, and I do not think compassion is served by pretending those questions are simple.
At the same time, I believe very deeply now that you owe yourself the chance to fight for your own life before deciding there is nothing in it for you.
Not for your parents. Not for your friends. Not because a stranger tells you that you are obligated to stay alive for everyone who would miss you.
For you.
Because you are the person who has carried yourself through every terrible thing that has happened to you so far, and there is something profoundly sad about allowing the worst moments of your life to make the final decision about what the rest of it is permitted to become. Wanting better for yourself, even tentatively, even inconsistently, is enough of a beginning. You do not have to suddenly love being alive. You do not have to become optimistic. Sometimes the first act of hope is simply refusing to make a permanent judgment about a life you have not finished living.
I cannot speak for everyone here. I do not know the lives you have lived, and I would never insult any of you by pretending I understand the precise depth or texture of your pain simply because I have experienced pain of my own. Some of you have endured things I cannot imagine. Some of you may have spent years exhausting every resource you were told was supposed to help you. Your suffering is real, and everything that brought you to this point matters, regardless of whether someone else would consider it sufficiently serious or whether you have convinced yourself that you should have been able to handle it differently.
But you are more than the things that have happened to you.
What happened cannot always be undone, but it does not have to remain the sole author of everything that comes afterward. There is still a part of the story that belongs to you.
I know how painfully cliché it can sound when someone tells you that there are people who care whether you live. When you are in that state of mind, statements like that can feel distant, sentimental, or even impossible to believe. So I am not asking you to believe it simply because I said it.
I am only telling you that I am a person who once spent time on this website believing, in one way or another, that my life had narrowed into something I could no longer bear. Two years later, I am writing this because I am grateful that I was wrong about what my future contained.
And if you cannot believe in your own future right now, perhaps you can leave a little room for the possibility that you might also be wrong about yours.
Please give yourself that possibility.
Ask for help when you need it. Try again when something does not work. Let yourself change your mind. Let yourself become someone you cannot picture yet. You are deserving of love, of tenderness, of discovery, and of the chance to build a life that feels like it actually belongs to you.
There is so much of you that has not happened yet.
I hope you stay long enough to meet it.
Best,
K
It has been about two years since I was actively using this website, and I have thought for a while about coming back here to write something. I think, more than anything, I want to leave behind something that I desperately needed to hear when I was spending so much of my time here: that a life can change so gradually that you do not even realize you are surviving your way into something better.
For most of my life, I struggled incessantly with thoughts of suicide and with this suffocating conviction that nothing was ever really going to change. There were periods where hopelessness stopped feeling temporary and instead became something almost inseparable from the way I understood myself and the world around me. I could not imagine becoming someone who would one day look back on that period of my life from a distance.
But I can now.
I have given it time, enough time that I feel comfortable saying this without being afraid that I am speaking too soon: I am in a much better place in my life now. That does not mean I don't often feel down. It would be dishonest to say that I do not still have days where I retreat into myself, become overwhelmed by my own thoughts, or feel some trace of that old heaviness returning. The difference is that those feelings no longer seem infinite to me. They no longer convince me that they are all there will ever be. My life has become populated by too many reminders that there are things worth staying for, people worth loving, experiences I could never have anticipated, and entire versions of myself that I would never have met if I had decided my story was already finished.
I wish I could tell you there was one thing that changed everything for me. There wasn't.
There was no singular revelation, no perfect medication, relationship, conversation, or morning where I woke up and suddenly wanted to be alive. The change happened in fragments. Some were so small that I probably did not recognize them as change at all when they were happening. But beneath all of it, I think there was one stubborn and incredibly important thing that remained: some part of me still wanted to get better. Even when that desire was faint, even when it existed beside the part of me that wanted everything to stop, it was there.
And I think that matters more than I understood at the time.
Suffering can become strangely familiar. When you have lived inside of it for long enough, even misery can begin to feel safer than the uncertainty of becoming someone else. Change is frightening precisely because it asks you to imagine a life you have no evidence for yet. When you are deeply depressed, possibility itself can feel almost insulting because you cannot see what everyone else insists must be waiting for you.
I understand that feeling.
But there are things beyond the horizon of what you can presently imagine. There are people whose names you do not know yet who may someday become impossibly important to you. There are places you have never stood, conversations you have never had, songs you have not heard at exactly the right moment, versions of yourself you have not grown into, and ordinary days that will mean nothing to anyone else but will quietly become evidence that staying was worth it. None of those things can prove themselves to you in advance. That is perhaps the cruelest part. Sometimes you have to remain here without having any certainty about what remaining here will eventually give you.
Hearing about younger people finding this website has affected me especially deeply. I know what it means to reach a point where spaces like this feel like one of the only places where the severity of what you are feeling can be spoken about without being immediately misunderstood or reduced to a cliché. I have always understood why conversations about unbearable suffering become intertwined with questions of autonomy, and I do not think compassion is served by pretending those questions are simple.
At the same time, I believe very deeply now that you owe yourself the chance to fight for your own life before deciding there is nothing in it for you.
Not for your parents. Not for your friends. Not because a stranger tells you that you are obligated to stay alive for everyone who would miss you.
For you.
Because you are the person who has carried yourself through every terrible thing that has happened to you so far, and there is something profoundly sad about allowing the worst moments of your life to make the final decision about what the rest of it is permitted to become. Wanting better for yourself, even tentatively, even inconsistently, is enough of a beginning. You do not have to suddenly love being alive. You do not have to become optimistic. Sometimes the first act of hope is simply refusing to make a permanent judgment about a life you have not finished living.
I cannot speak for everyone here. I do not know the lives you have lived, and I would never insult any of you by pretending I understand the precise depth or texture of your pain simply because I have experienced pain of my own. Some of you have endured things I cannot imagine. Some of you may have spent years exhausting every resource you were told was supposed to help you. Your suffering is real, and everything that brought you to this point matters, regardless of whether someone else would consider it sufficiently serious or whether you have convinced yourself that you should have been able to handle it differently.
But you are more than the things that have happened to you.
What happened cannot always be undone, but it does not have to remain the sole author of everything that comes afterward. There is still a part of the story that belongs to you.
I know how painfully cliché it can sound when someone tells you that there are people who care whether you live. When you are in that state of mind, statements like that can feel distant, sentimental, or even impossible to believe. So I am not asking you to believe it simply because I said it.
I am only telling you that I am a person who once spent time on this website believing, in one way or another, that my life had narrowed into something I could no longer bear. Two years later, I am writing this because I am grateful that I was wrong about what my future contained.
And if you cannot believe in your own future right now, perhaps you can leave a little room for the possibility that you might also be wrong about yours.
Please give yourself that possibility.
Ask for help when you need it. Try again when something does not work. Let yourself change your mind. Let yourself become someone you cannot picture yet. You are deserving of love, of tenderness, of discovery, and of the chance to build a life that feels like it actually belongs to you.
There is so much of you that has not happened yet.
I hope you stay long enough to meet it.
Best,
K
