It wasn’t long after Andrea left the US that I decided that the world would be better off without me. I would go home after school and, before Mom got home, I would get a number of tablets out of the cupboard and wonder how many I would need to take to get the job done. The only other means of escape was with a knife… but I thought that pills wouldn’t hurt as much as cutting my wrist. I was displaying all the symptoms of a girl who wanted to die. I was doing a project in school about death. My very soul ached from the lack of affection but my desperation made me too vulnerable in the world of a teenager. I was being picked on at school. I was alone and lonely. I prayed to God to take me in the night. I couldn’t see a reason to go on.
Finally one day I’d had a bad day at school. I got home. Called my mom (because I was a latch-key kid) and I got the pills out. I opened the bottles and started to swallow… Then the phone rang. It was a friend. Someone cared. I don’t remember what we talked about – just the usual stuff. But for me, that was enough to make me look at the tablets, put the tops back on the bottles and tucked it all back in the pantry again.
A couple of years later, I was talking to the same friend. I was concerned about him. Those of us who have been so very low can recognise others who are on the bottom rung. He didn’t have a reason to go on. So I gave him a reason: I told him that he saved my life. I don’t think he quite believed me at first but, the more I talked, the more he understood where I had got to emotionally, what I had done, what I had planned to do, and how his just being there was enough to make me keep going. If he decided that his life wasn’t worth living, then he would have to take me with him – because he had saved my life.
