Content Note: This essay discusses mental illness, suicidal ideation, and death. Please read with care.
I’m Here… For Now
“Do you have thoughts about harming yourself, or ending your life?”
Her question cut directly to the reason I was there. Shifting in my chair, I searched for words precise enough to answer without exposing too much of myself.
“I’d never do it,” I said. “I’m a Christian. And I know that if I were to take my life, I’d have no hope at all for a better tomorrow. This way, maybe there’s still a chance the sun rises again.”
Perhaps it was as much an effort to convince myself as it was to convince her.
I had been seeing a therapist for some time by then. Our weekly sessions revolved around my increasingly fragile mental health, though I am not sure they felt like progress. What I remember most clearly is not sadness, but numbness. A vast emotional void. To feel anything, even pain, would have felt like joy. Pain, at least, would have confirmed that I was still here.
There is a peculiar cruelty in moving through the world while feeling untouched by it. You learn to wear a mask for the sake of those you encounter. You laugh when expected. You respond on cue. You perform wellness convincingly enough that no one looks too closely. Over time, that performance becomes its own purgatory, a self-imposed isolation. Because the only thing worse than falling into the black hole of your own inner life is the fear of dragging others down with you.
So you retreat. You ration your energy. You disappear into darkened corners when the stamina required to maintain the facade finally runs out. I spent days at a time, sometimes weeks, alone in my room, observing life from a distance. Every emergence became a mission. Every interaction a minefield.
“Hey, how are you?”
The question is never really a question. There is a correct answer, and it is always some variation of, I’m fine, thanks. How about you? But the dishonesty of those words felt unbearable, so I learned to evade without confessing.
“I’m here,” I would say.
It was technically true. And it carried just enough ambiguity to pass without inviting further inquiry.
For a long time, survival was the only form of life I could grasp.
If I was still here, still breathing, still waking, still dragging myself through the rituals of a day, then perhaps somewhere ahead there was a version of life that would not feel like this. Surely despair announces itself clearly. Surely real suffering ends decisively. What I did not understand then was that the most honest sign of life is not certainty, joy, or even hope. It is resistance. It is struggle. It is the body and mind holding on when there is nowhere else to go.
That struggle had a texture, a shape, a geography of its own.
f2PointEight 
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