I must have been eight or so when I attended my first funeral. I was fourteen when I first met someone who self-harmed, and sixteen when I considered it myself. I never did anything, for whatever reason. I was trapped by my family and their expectations of who I was to be as a daughter and sister for eighteen years. It wasn't anything we discussed, just something I picked up on through "jokes" and passing comments about this or that. This meant I didn't talk a whole lot about what really mattered to me, including myself.

Since middle school, there's been a sort of emotional turmoil in my mind. I tried not to let on, but it wasn't one of those things I felt like I had to hide. My dad picked up on it, though. He used to let me out in the field on the side of the road leading back to hell part two-- school was part one for the longest time-- so I could scream 'fuck-you's' until the crease between my brow eased slightly. Talking to yourself was something you did loudly in the backyard at ten o' clock before you went to bed. Cutting your wrists was something your friend did in the darkness of her grandmother's bathroom before she came to school. I wasn't like that.

I was sick in the head and I am sick in the head and I never did anything too terrible to my exterior. I kept it all inside. Every problem had its shelf, a jar crisscrossed with cracks holding everything that would poison me if it got loose. It didn't for the longest time. When it did, I went to therapy.

I was fine.

Not okay, not great, not splendid and wonderful. Life wasn't a bowl of sprinkles by any means, but it wasn't a pile of shit, either. I was doing all right.

Something got jolted loose maybe a week ago, and that little inconvenience called depression reared its terribly familiar head. Someone died. Somebody I hardly knew passed on and I didn't know how to feel about it because I didn't really know them so was I allowed to be sad? God, I should've asked someone.

I started having really bad thoughts-- prominently, for the first time, I suppose-- within a few days of stumbling upon the news of the sudden loss of my coach. Nothing outwardly showed, but on the inside I was crumbling, Every time I passed a staircase, I got the urge to climb to the top just so I could fall back down. I couldn't take my pocket knife with me when I went to cry in the middle of the night at various places on campus because I didn't trust myself not to slice my hand to ribbons with it. I'd keep my hands in my pockets and make sure I was always moving somewhere because I figured out when I sat on a bench for too long I'd get the itch to sit on the ground and scrape the back of my hand bloody on the pavement.

My intrusive thoughts are real.

They are a manifestation of everything that has ever been wrong with me, and I can't do a thing about it. I'm too embarrassed to seek help. I'm too devastated by myself to tell you to your face that sometimes I think about dying.

It's just a thing, but it doesn't mean I don't want to live.