Life With Depression - Second Cry For Help

Second Cry for Help

As I mentioned earlier, Sometimes, even words, whether spoken or written, can give a great indication that something is seriously wrong. One of the ways I dealt with everything that was going on was through writing. I mostly wrote poems of how I felt, and so began a brief stage of poetry writing, unfortunately it was all depressive poetry, but it helped to relieve some of the emotional pain I was going through. I never let anyone read what I wrote, except once, but I filled two notebooks worth of poems all about death, pain, sadness, worthlessness, unhappiness and nothingness, as I called it. One of the poems that got me started, and has stuck with me through life, and even to this day I find myself repeating it at least twice a week is one I read early on into my poem writing. This poem seemed to so easily say everything I felt inside on the surface. The poem is as follows:

Curse thee life!

I will live with thee no more!

Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore

And all for a pledge, that was not pledged by me

And now I go

Nor threat, nor easy vow

Of tardy kindness, can avail thee now

With me whence fear

And faith alike are flown

Lonely I came and I depart alone

And know not where nor unto whom I go

But that thou canst not follow me I know

~Author Unknown

As you can see, even the written word can say so much and hold enough emotional meaning to tell that something is wrong. Only once did I share a poem with anyone during this stage of poetry. Here begins the second cry for help.

I was in my English class, at the age of thirteen, and the English teacher handed out an assignment to do in class and turn in by the end of the period. After completing the assignment, I wrote a poem on the assignment about death and killing myself and turned the assignment in. This, in hopes that being a bit more direct I might finally get guidance on the help I needed in order to start feeling better. Everyday things got worse, and I didn’t know what to do, I was scared, and felt I had nowhere to turn. My chest was filled with emotional tears on the inside. I felt as though I were screaming for help but no one was listening, no one even bothered to care enough to look in my direction. So with hopes of hope, I could only wait to see how the teacher responded to what I had written.

The next day came and once the English period started the teacher handed back the in class assignments we had done the other day. When she handed back my assignment she had the graded mark and also had left a note on the assignment in red ink. The note was as follows: “This is a great poem, you should enter this into the poem contest, keep up the good writing, you have a lot of talent.” I crumpled up the assignment and threw it out on my way out the door. For the second time my cry for help went ignored, what was wrong with me? Why did no one seem to care even when I took a more direct approach? Was I really that worthless of a person? For the first time, there were no tears inside or out. There was nothing left to be upset about. I died at the age of thirteen, but my body just wouldn’t give in. What was the point? Nobody cared about me, how I was feeling, or that I wanted to kill myself. I wouldn’t be missed except by those of few family members but in time it would heal and I would be but a memory.

For the first time I attempted suicide. I had no idea what I was doing but I thought that if I downed a bottle of Tylenol it would kill me, and I did exactly that later that night. Unfortunately it only made me extremely sick all night. Before I completely shut down, I would make one last attempt to get the help I needed and to get everyone’s attention, but this time I would be as direct as I could be.