Every three minutes, five people commit suicide.
By the end of this poem, 12 people would have died.
I could’ve been one of those people.
When I first heard the word “depression” I didn’t know what it meant.
Then as time passed by acquaintances turned to friends.
Day by day, side by side
Depression became the closest friend I had in my life.
Always there to tell me I messed up.
Always there to tell me my best isn’t good enough.
The weight of my failures and flaws and weaknesses
crushing me until I couldn’t breathe.
Pushing people away to see who really cares.
Loneliness haunting, trust always lacking.
My sense of self-worth has always been low.
Being the cause of disruption at home.
Staring at my reflection hating everything I see.
Realising that everything I think will end up killing me.
For me, I guess this started with family.
And when parents parted ways
I was blamed for discrepancy.
“If it weren’t for you, we could still be together”
“You’re too much like her”
“You’re the reason he hates me”
The idea of love,
a happy family,
confidence
disappeared.
But it doesn’t matter where it came from,
it matters that it stayed.
Now almost two years ago
was the first time I wanted to die.
It was also my 14th birthday.
The day had gone just fine,
spent with friends who I am now thankful to call mine
but coming home and believing that
they are worth more.
That I did not deserve them.
I lay in bed ’til 3am crying my eyes out
because I knew I couldn’t handle it.
I couldn’t handle comparing myself to them in every way shape and form.
I couldn’t handle how fragile I was and how easy I would break.
I couldn’t handle living with and being
a monster.
I wasn’t a good enough daughter,
or a good enough friend.
My looks weren’t good enough.
My grades weren’t good enough.
My brain is not good enough.
You see, what goes on inside my mind
doesn’t correspond to work with the daily grind.
Because I am a bottle of uncertainty, psychosis, and insecurity.
When picked up, I’m only destined to fall.
When shaken, everything inside me becomes a tornado,
wrecking chaos into everything I touch and feel.
I would empty my insides so small there was only room for butterflies.
Decorate my plates so it would look like I had ate.
Exercise to the point where I would faint,
simply because I listened to what the devils had to say.
Trapped in my bubble of self-consciousness,
feeling like my chest was going to explode,
like my lungs were going to collapse.
Carving the word worthless into the armature that is my body,
purposely trying to feel pain because I felt so much of it,
I felt nothing at all.
I would starve myself for days,
paint my skin with a blade,
sit alone with smoke in my lungs,
suicide consuming my brain.
And what is worse,
is that I would hate myself for it.
Hate what I had become;
drunk on my depression.
Letting it take over my life and
ruin me.
This depression is a tidal wave.
Starting small then destroying all
sanity, judgement, and hope.
Meltdowns coming in surprise floods of anxiety,
sinking in the depths of my fears and desolation.
With the only comforting feeling in the world being
staring down at the concrete, letting addiction come over me.
Seeing that I’m drowning,
but not knowing if I ever wanted to breathe.
And god damn it,
I wanted to kill myself and you were yelling about dirty dishes.
Where am I supposed to hide these thoughts of mine
for everything I feel has been stigmatized?
For too long I’ve had to keep these demons inside
my wretched mind, but now it’s best to end my time.
—
“I don’t want to have so much anxiety that my throat gets sore,
I forget how to walk,
and I want to destroy all that I touch.
I don’t trust my emotions because they change so much,
but I trust the insanity because it’s always been there.
I’m tired of feeling happy and sad and insane in the span of one year.
I’m tired of thinking there’s hope for me
because I’ll always come back to this.
I don’t want to live a life where I’m predisposed to feeling sadness.”
—
This is the part where I’m supposed to
write about recovery.
This was quite hard for me because
I was four months clean.
Not a single suicidal thought
disguised as a daydream.
I relapsed, welcomed the darkness back
into my fragile, broken soul.
But a relapse is nothing to be ashamed of. This is nothing to be ashamed of.
I made it once before and I damn sure trying again.
For all I know this is going to be a part of me.
A shadow forever following,
thoughts forever lurking
at the back of my sick mind,
but I am alive.
And these scars don’t make me, me.
I am me because of my morals,
my hopes, my dreams,
and everything in between.
But I am not going forget about this.
Through the madness that has defined two years of my life,
I am coming out stronger.
With the ability to notice others’ emotions,
more sure of my ability to survive,
aware of the shitty people,
aware of the great.
More aware of what hope looks like,
fighting with myself to find myself
and if I stumble I have people to smack me in the face
and tell I’m insane.
That I am loved and it’s okay to be sad.
Venting, movies
poetry, music,
friends, family
whatever makes you calm
do more of it.
Petty “relationships”,
familial and societal expectations,
the never-ending pressure from school
are not worth risking your sanity.
Your mental health comes first.
Doesn’t matter if it will take a week or a month or a year,
when they say it gets better
it is so hard to believe, but it’s true.
Believe me, I’d know.
I am the only thing I will have in my life permanently
so I better take damn care of myself.
If you think it’s impossible to find hope,
just know you’re not alone.
Because there are kids like me like you,
all over the world
all over the country
all over this godforsaken town.
And before you come to any conclusions
This is not just me.
This is not just my story.
This is the story of the broken, beaten, and damned.
Of the 11 students I interviewed, one including myself.
A sneak peak of all the suffering, stress, and scars
represented in one story.
This is for the kids who are too scared to try.
This is for the kids who are afraid of their own mind.
For the kids who look at themselves in the mirror
and can’t help but cry.
For the kids who wear long sleeves in the summer.
For the kids who tread the waters of their mental illness
with the weight of the world on their shoulders bringing them down
but they keep going whether they like it or not.
This is for you,
and for me.
For the parents who don’t understand,
and for the parents who do.
For Patch, August, Grace,
Luc Ly, Caitlin, Cage,
Suffocated, Eli
Band Aids & Bravery,
Dazed and Confused.
For the kids who get a little red marker on their wrist
and decide to keep drawing scars
because they think it’s funny.
For the kids who drag scissors across their arm in my science class
because they wanted to know why people cut themselves
then laugh when they don’t get it.
If you think I’m weak,
you clearly don’t understand the point of this piece.
The world is a dark place, and sometimes
it’s hard to see the sunshine
I know what I want to live for,
and I refuse to get in the way of myself.
UNMASKED, a commentary by Gari De Ramos
“I created this – whether it be for the students who didn’t think these problems were prevalent among their peers, or those with similar feelings to those in this video – with the hopes that it exposes the depth, tragedy, and complexity that many live with, to shed light on the stigma of adolescent problems, and to reach out to those struggling who remain in the dark.
I initially set out for my Personal Project, a collection of interviews I had with anonymous students and their tales of depression, to be in the form of a book. As you can see, this isn’t a book. This is a spoken word poem. I was forced to change my final product because I was not informed that I would need to have legal forms signed by my interviewees and their parents, as well as having to undergo a psychological evaluation regarding the ethics of my interviews.
Things got incredibly explicit and raw, eventually to the point where my supervisor could not read more than a page. Even if I had all the legal problems sorted, I still would have been advised to change my final product because my advisor(s) deemed the ethics behind my product to be poor. I would have had to censor my product in case it emotionally hurt my audience, gave ideas to persons in similar situations, and risked revealing the identity of the anonymous interviewees.
After all of this, I was given an extension and changed my product to this spoken word poem. It mainly tells my story, but there are glimpses of the 10 other students I interviewed.
I hope to give my viewers a deeper look into the lives of students, for we are more than just numbers and percentages. We deal with these emotions, behaviors we can’t control, and pain, on a day-to-day basis. But many people don’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation. It is also important to understand that people like me existing with you, achieving with you, striving with you. We are very much like you, we just have a little heavier baggage.
Dedicated to Patch, August, Grace, Luc Ly, Caitlin, Cage, Suffocated, Eli, Band Aids & Bravery, Dazed, and Confused.”
Read an interview with Gari De Ramos here