When I was in grade 6 one of my classmates came into school near the end of the school year on a Monday morning. He was visibly upset and as soon as he sat down my teacher spoke and said; your classmate (I’m going to call him Larry) has had a rough weekend, and to tell you about it our school Councillor is going to speak to us (the school Councillor is his mom); she came in and says “no doubt you've seen the look on my sons face, I am here to tell you why him and I are so upset, Saturday morning Larry lost his brother.” She went on to explain that he had committed suicide. She was the last one to see him alive the night before, she had actually had what sounded like it would have been a really good heart to heart talk with him as he would have graduated that year. Apparently that wasn’t enough.
Fast forward a couple years, another of my friend’s older brothers committed suicide; this one worked as a firefighter and nobody had realized he was depressed.
Move to the fall of 2009, I had just started my nursing course and my mother had started anti-depressants; turns out she was allergic to the ones prescribed to her by her doctor and she became suicidal, he thought they weren't working and upped her dosage. During my course I almost lost my mom 4 times. The last time was five days before I graduated. I came upstairs at 18 years of age to see my mother laying on the bathroom floor moaning with a couple empty bottles of pills lying beside her on the floor. Needless to say I didn't go to school that day, and my dad didn’t go to work. Waiting for that ambulance was the hardest day of my life, and I am so glad for what the doctors and nursing staff did to save her.
Then there’s me. What I’m about to say to this community has never been heard by anyone else on the planet. If it wasn’t for a couple of new friends I made two and a half years ago, I would not be here. I have attempted suicide many times and at the last second stopped myself. Many more times than I can count. I have struggled with depression for about 10 years now and it’s something I still don’t 100% cope with. This past year I had a relationship with what should have been the love of my life, until her parents decided they didn't like me, and she started being the worst person I've ever met. But this time something was different, I had friends I knew I could talk to, people I felt safe with. Because up until two and a half years ago, I was considered a loser with no friends, in high school I was bullied and treated horribly, I was this chubby short awkward teenager with low self-esteem that nobody cared about, and had I had the friends I do now I might have done better in school.
